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The Ships of Magellan. 



ThE STORY OF 
GEOGRAPHICAL 
DISCOVERY 

HOW THE WORLD BECAME KNOWN 

BY 

JOSEPH JACOBS 



WITH TWENTY-FOUR MAPS, ETC. 


NEW YORK 
MCMXV 




Copyright, 1898, 1902, 1915 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


r « 

< i < 

/ 

JAN 20 1916 

©CI.A418536 

*>V0 -\ 1 


PREFACE. 


The explorer and discoverer holds a unique 
place in history. The fame of the statesman or 
the soldier who controls or decides the fate of a 
nation may decline and disappear outside the 
boundaries of his own land. Except to his 
own countrymen his memory may endure only as 
a name, his deeds be forgotten. But the ex¬ 
plorer and his achievements belong to the world 
at large. His exploits belong to the romance of 
history and exercise a peculiar fascination over 
the minds of men. Those hardy and adven¬ 
turous spirits who have extended the boundaries 
of the known world have been the popular heroes 
of all time and posterity is generous in its appre¬ 
ciation of their contributions to the progress of 
civilization. 

The romance of exploration and geographical 
discovery is now completely written. The North 
and South Poles offered the last of the great 
adventures which the unknown regions of the 

5 



6 


PREFACE. 


earth set before the ambition and daring of ex¬ 
plorers. Both were achieved within three years 
of each other, the North Pole by Peary in April, 
1909, and the South Pole by Amundsen in De¬ 
cember, 1911, and by Scott a month later. Large 
areas of the earth’s surface, in Asia, Africa, 
South America and the polar regions remain 
practically unknown and undeveloped. They will 
continue to attract the explorer for detailed ex¬ 
amination, but his discoveries will have little of 
the appeal to the popular mind of the great 
achievements of the past. 

This little book tells the story of geograph¬ 
ical discovery from the earliest times. Beginning 
with the spread of conquest in the ancient world, 
the science of geography languished during the 
Dark Ages, to be revived by the travels of Marco 
Polo and other mediaeval travellers. From 
Prince Henry the Navigator and Columbus to 
Peary and Scott, the story is one of steady prog¬ 
ress and of unfailing interest. An appendix 
gives a survey of the annals of geographical 
discovery for twenty-five centuries. 

July, 1915. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER PACK 

Preface . 5 

List of Maps and Illustrations ... 9 

Introduction.13 

I. The World as Known to the Ancients . 17 

II. The Spread of Conquest in the Ancient 

World.33 

III. Geography in the Dark Ages ... 43 

IV. Mediaeval Travels—Marco Polo, Ibn Ba- 

tuta.63 

V. Roads and Commerce.74 

VI. To the Indies Eastward — Portuguese 
Route — Prince Henry and Vasco Da 

Gama.84 

VII. To the Indies Westward—Spanish Route 

—Columbus and Magellan. ... 98 

VIII. To the Indies Northwards — English, 

French, Dutch, and Russian Routes . 119 

IX. The Partition of America . . . .128 

X. Australia and the South Seas—Tasman 

and Cook.139 

XI. Exploration and Partition of Africa— 

Park, Livingstone, and Stanley . . 153 

XII. The Poles—Franklin, Ross, Nordenskiold, 

Nansen, Peary, Amundsen, and Scott . 169 

Annals of Discovery.186 


7 








OTV \J 


Arms granted to Sebastian Del Cano, Captain 
of the Victoria, the first vessel that 
circumnavigated the Globe. 


[For a description , see p . xx&'i 
























































LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 


Coat-of-arms of Del Cano (from Guillemard, Magellan . 
By kind permission of Messrs. Phillips.) For the blazon, see 
pp. 116-17. Frontispiece 

The Earliest Map of the World (from the Rev. C. J. 
Ball’s Bible Illustrations , 1898).—This is probably of the 
eighth century B.C., and indicates the Babylonian view of the 
world surrounded by the ocean, which is indicated by the 
parallel circles, and traversed by the Euphrates, which is seen 
meandering through the middle, with Babylon, the great city, 
crossing it at the top. Beyond the ocean are seven successive 
projections of land, possibly indicating the Babylonian knowl¬ 
edge of surrounding countries beyond the Euxine and the Red 
Sea.Page 20- 

The World according- to Ptolemy. —It will be observed 
that the Greek geographer regarded the Indian Ocean as a 
landlocked body of water, while he appears to have some 
knowledge of the sources of the Nile. The general tendency 
of the map is to extend Asia very much to the east, which led 
to the miscalculation encouraging Columbus to discover 
America.Page 29 

The Roman Roads of Europe (drawn specially for this 

work).—These give roughly the limits within which the inland 
geographical knowledge of the ancients reach some degrees of 
accuracy . . ..Page 41 

Geographical Monsters (from an early edition of Mande- 
ville’s Travels ).—Most of the mediaeval maps were dotted 
over with similar monstrosities .... Page 46 


9 





10 


LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 


The Hereford Map. —This, one of the best known of 
mediaeval maps, was drawn by Richard of Aldingham about 
1307. Like most of these maps, it has the east with the 
terrestrial paradise at the top, and Jerusalem is represented 
as the centre.Page 48 

Peutinger Table, Western Part. —This is the only 
Roman map extant ; it gives lines of roads from the eastern 
shores of Britain to the Adriatic Sea. It is really a kind of 
bird’s-eye view taken from the African coast. The Mediter¬ 
ranean runs as a thin strip through the lower part of the map. 
The lower section joins on to the upper . . Page 51 

The World according to Ibn Haukal (from Lelewel, 
Geographic du mon age). —This map, like most of the Arabian 
maps, has the south at the top. It is practically only a dia¬ 
gram, and is thus similar to the Hereford Map in general 
form.—Misr= Egypt, Fars=Persia, Andalus=Spain Page 57 

Coast-line of the Mediterranean (from the Portulano 
of Dulcert, 1339, given in Nordenskiold Facsimile Atlas). —To 
illustrate the accuracy with which mariners’ charts gave the 
coast-lines as contrasted with the merely symbolical represen¬ 
tation of other mediaeval maps .... Page 61 

Fra Mauro Map, 1457 (from Lelewel, loc. cit .).—Here, 
as usual, the south is placed at the top of the map. Besides 
the ordinary mediaeval conceptions, Fra Mauro included the 
Portuguese discoveries along the coast of Africa up to his 
time, 1457.Page 70 

Portuguese Discoveries in Africa (from E. J. Payne, 
European Colonies , 1877).—Giving the successive points 
reached by the Portuguese navigators during the fifteenth 
century.Page 87 

Portuguese Indies (from Payne, loc. cit.) —All the ports 
mentioned in ordinary type were held by the Portuguese in 

the sixteenth century.Page 95 

The Toscanelli Map (from Kretschmer, Entdeckung 
Americas, 1892).—This is a reconstruction of the map which 
Columbus got from the Italian astronomer and cartographer 


LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 


II 


Toscanelli and used to guide him in his voyage across the 
Atlantic. Its general resemblance to the Behaim globe will 
be remarked.Page 100 

The Behaim Globe. —This gives the information about 
the world possessed in 1492, just as Columbus was starting, 
and is mainly based upon the map of Toscanelli, which served 
as his guide. It will be observed that there is no other con¬ 
tinent between Spain and Zipangu or Japan, while the fabled 
islands of St. Brandan and Antilia are represented bridging 
the expanse between the Azores and Japan . Page 1^4 

Amerigo Vespucci (from Fiske’s School History of the 
United States , by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co.).Page no 

Ferdinand Magellan (from Fiske’s School History of the 
United States , by kind permission of Messrs. Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co.).Page 113 

Map of the World, from the Ptolemy Edition of 1548 
(after Kretschmer’s Entdeckungsgeschichte Amerikas). —It will 
be observed that Mexico is supposed to be joined on to Asia, 
and that the North Pacific was not even known 
to exist.Page 117 

Russian Asia (after the Atlas published by the Russian 
Academy of Sciences in 1737, by kind permission of Messrs, 
Hachette). Japan is represented as a peninsula. Page 125 

Australia as known in 1745 (from D’Anville’s Atlas , by 
kind permission of Messrs. Hachette).—It will be seen that 
the Northern and Western coasts were even by this time 
tolerably well mapped out, leaving only the eastern coast to 
be explored by Cook.Page 140 

Australia, showing routes of explorations (prepared 
specially for the present volume). The names of the chief 
explorers are given at the top of the map . . Page 151 

Africa as known in 1676 (from Dapper’s Atlas). —This 
includes a knowledge of most of the African rivers and lakes 
due to the explorations of the Portuguese . . Page 155 





12 


LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 


Africa (made specially for this volume, to show chief ex¬ 
plorations and partition).—The names of the explorers are 
given at the foot of the map itself . . . Page 161 

North Polar Regions, Western Half (prepared 
specially for the present volume from the Citizen's Atlas , by 
kind permission of Messrs. Bartholomew).—This gives the 
results ot the discoveries due to Franklin expeditions and 
most of the searchers after the North-West 
Passage.Page 175 

North Polar Regions, Eastern Half. —This gives the 
Siberian coast investigated by the Russians and Nordenskiold, 
as well as Nansen’s Farthest North . . Page 179 


THE STORY OF 
GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 


INTRODUCTION. 

How was the world discovered ? That is to 
say, how did a certain set of men who lived 
round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired 
the art of recording what each generation had 
learned, become successively aware of the other 
parts of the globe ? Every part of the earth, 
so far as we know, has been inhabited by man 
during the five or six thousand years in which 
Europeans have been storing up their knowl¬ 
edge, and all that time the inhabitants of each 
part, of course, were acquainted with that par¬ 
ticular part: the Kamtschatkans knew Kamts- 
chatka, the Greenlanders, Greenland; the various 
tribes of North American Indians knew, at any 
rate, that part of America over which they 
wandered, long before Columbus, as we say, 
“ discovered ” it. 

Very often these savages not only know their 
own country, but can express their knowledge 
in maps of very remarkable accuracy. Cortes 
traversed over 1000 miles through Central 
America, guided only by a calico map of a local 
cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew 
out, from his own knowledge of the coast 
between Smith Channel and Cape York, a map 

13 



14 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

of it, varying only in minute details from the 
Admiralty chart. A native of Tahiti, named 
Tupaia, drew out for Cook a map of the Pacific, 
extending over forty-five degrees of longitude 
(nearly 3000 miles), giving the relative size and 
position of the main islands over that huge tract 
of ocean. Almost all geographical discoveries 
by Europeans have, in like manner, been brought 
about by means of guides, who necessarily knew 
the country which their European masters wished 
to “ discover.” 

What, therefore, we mean by the history of 
geographical discovery is the gradual bringing 
to the knowledge of the nations of civilisa¬ 
tion surrounding the Mediterranean Sea the 
vast tracts of land extending in all directions 
from it. There are mainly two divisions of 
this history—the discovery of the Old World 
and that of the New, including Australia under 
the latter term. Though we speak of geo¬ 
graphical discovery, it is really the discovery 
of new tribes of men that we are thinking of. 
It is only quite recently that men have sought 
for knowledge about lands, apart from the men 
who inhabit them. One might almost say that 
the history of geographical discovery, properly 
so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive 
of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity. 
But before his time men wanted to know one 
another for two chief reasons: they wanted to 
conquer, or they wanted to trade; or perhaps 
we could reduce the motives to one—they 
wanted to conquer, because they wanted to 
trade. In our own day we have seen a remark¬ 
able mixture of all three motives, resulting in 
the European partition of Africa—perhaps the 


INTRODUCTION. 


15 


most remarkable event of the latter end of the 
nineteenth century. Speke and Burton, Living¬ 
stone and Stanley, investigated the interior from 
love of adventure and of knowledge ; then came 
the great chartered trading companies; and, 
finally, the governments to which these belong 
have assumed responsibility for the territories 
thus made known to the civilised world. Within 
forty years the map of Africa, which was prac¬ 
tically a blank in the interior, and, as will be 
shown, was better known in 1680 than in 1850, 
has been filled up almost completely by re¬ 
searches due to motives of conquest, of trade, or 
of scientific curiosity. 

In its earlier stages, then, the history of 
geographical discovery is mainly a history of 
conquest, and what we shall have to do will be 
to give a short history of the ancient world, 
from the point of view of how that world be¬ 
came known. “ Became known to whom ? ” 
you may ask; and we must determine that 
question first. We might, of course, take the 
earliest geographical work known to us—the 
tenth chapter of Genesis—and work out how 
the rest of the world became known to the 
Israelites when they became part of the Roman 
Empire; but in history all roads lead to Rome 
or away from it, and it is more useful for every 
purpose to take Rome as our centre-point. 
Yet Rome only came in as the heir of earlier 
empires that spread the knowledge of the earth 
and man by conquest long before Rome was of 
importance; and even when the Romans were 
the masters of all this vast inheritance, they had 
not themselves the ability to record the geo¬ 
graphical knowledge thus acquired, and it is to a 


16 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Greek named Ptolemy, a professor of the great 
university of Alexandria, to whom we owe our 
knowledge of how much the ancient world knew 
of the earth. It will be convenient to determine 
this first, and afterwards to sketch rapidly the 
course of historical events which led to the 
knowledge which Ptolemy records. 

In the Middle Ages, much of this knowledge, 
like all other, was lost, and we shall have to 
record how knowledge was replaced by imagina¬ 
tion and theory. The true inheritors of Greek 
science during that period were the Arabs, and 
the few additions to real geographical knowledge 
at that time were due to them, except in so 
far as commercial travellers and pilgrims brought 
a more intimate knowledge of Asia to the 
West. 

The discovery of America forms the be¬ 
ginning of a new period, both in modern 
history and in modern geography. In the 
four hundred years that have elapsed since 
then, more than twice as much of the inhabited 
globe has become known to civilised man than 
in the preceding four thousand years. The 
result is that, except for a few patches of Africa, 
South America, and round the Poles, man 
knows roughly what are the physical resources 
of the world he inhabits, and, except for minor 
details, the history of geographical discovery is 
practically at an end. 

Besides its interest as a record of war and ad¬ 
venture, this history gives the successive stages 
by which modern men have been made what they 
are. The longest known countries and peoples 
have, on the whole, had the deepest influence in 
the forming of the civilised character. Nor is the 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 17 

practical utility of this study less important. The 
way in which the world has been discovered de¬ 
termines now-a-days the world’s history. The 
great problems of the twentieth century will have 
immediate relation to the discoveries of America, 
of Africa, and of Australia. In all these problems, 
English speaking peoples will have most to say 
and to do, and the history of geographical dis¬ 
covery is, therefore, of immediate and immense 
interest to them. 

[Authorities : Cooley, History of Maritime and Inland 
Discoveries , 3 vols., 1831 ; Vivien de Saint Martin, Histoire 
de la G'eographie, 1873.] 


CHAPTER I. 

THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 

Before telling how the ancients got to know 
that part of the world with which they finally 
became acquainted when the Roman Empire was 
at its greatest extent, it is as well to get some idea 
of the successive stages of their knowledge, leaving 
for the next chapter the story of how that knowl¬ 
edge was obtained. As in most branches of or¬ 
ganised knowledge, it is to the Greeks that we 
owe our acquaintance with ancient views of this 
subject. In the early stages they possibly learned 
something from the Phoenicians, who were the 
great traders and sailors of antiquity, and who 
coasted along the Mediterranean, ventured through 
the Straits of Gibraltar, and traded with the Brit¬ 
ish Isles, which they visited for the tin found in 


18 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Cornwall. It is even said that one of their ad¬ 
mirals, at the command of Necho, king of Egypt., 
circumnavigated Africa, for Herodotus reports 
that on the homeward voyage the sun set in the 
sea on the right hand. But the Phoenicians kept 
their geographical knowledge to themselves as a 
trade secret, and the Greeks learned but little 
from them. 

The first glimpse that we have of the notions 
which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the 
inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems 
passing under the name of Homer. These poems 
show an intimate knowledge of Northern Greece 
and of the western coasts of Asia Minor, some 
acquaintance with Egypt, Cyprus, and Sicily; but 
all the rest, even of :he Eastern Mediterranean, 
is only vaguely conceived by their author. Where 
he does not know he imagines, and some of his 
imaginings have had a most important influence 
upon the progress of geographical knowledge. 
Thus he conceives of the world as being a sort of 
flat shield, with an extremely wide river surround¬ 
ing it, known as Ocean. The centre of this shield 
was at Delphi, which was regarded as the “ navel ” 
of the inhabited world. According to Hesiod, 
who is but little later than Homer, up in the far 
north were placed a people known as the Hyper - 
boreani, or those who dwelt at the back of the 
north wind ; whilst a corresponding place in the 
south was taken by the Abyssinians. All these 
four conceptions had an important influence upon 
the views that men had of the world up to times 
comparatively recent. Homer also mentioned the 
pigmies as living in Africa. These were regarded 
as fabulous, till they were re-discovered by Dr. 
Schweinfurth and Mr. Stanley in our own time. 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 19 

It is probably from the Babylonians that the 
Greeks obtained the idea of an all - encircling- 
ocean. Inhabitants of Mesopotamia would find 
themselves reaching the ocean in almost any di¬ 
rection in which they travelled, either the Caspian, 
the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, or the Persian 
Gulf. Accordingly, the oldest map of the world 
which has been found is one accompanying a 
cuneiform inscription, and representing the plain 
of Mesopotamia with the Euphrates flowing 
through it, and the whole surrounded by two con¬ 
centric circles, which are named briny waters. 
Outside these, however, are seven detached islets, 
possibly representing the seven zones or climates 
into which the world was divided according to 
the ideas of the Babylonians, though afterwards 
they resorted to the ordinary four cardinal points. 
What was roughly true of Babylonia did not in 
any way answer to the geographical position of 
Greece, and it is therefore probable that in the 
first place they obtained their ideas of the sur¬ 
rounding ocean from the Babylonians. 

It was after the period of Homer and Hesiod 
that the first great expansion of Greek knowledge 
about the world began, through the extensive 
colonisation which was carried on by the Greeks 
around the Eastern Mediterranean. Even to this 
day the natives of the southern part of Italy speak 
a Greek dialect, owing to the wide extent of Greek 
colonies in that country, which used to be called 
“ Magna Grecia,” or “ Great Greece.” Marseilles 
was also one of the Greek colonies (600 b.c.), 
which, in its turn, sent out other colonies along 
the Gulf of Lyons. In the East, too, Greek cities 
were dotted along the coast of the Black Sea, one 
of which, Byzantium, was destined to be of world- 


.20 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 



The earliest map of the World. 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 21 

historic importance. So, too, in North Africa, 
and among the islands of the ^Egean Sea, the 
Greeks colonised throughout the sixth and fifth 
centuries b. c., and in almost every case communi¬ 
cation was kept up between the colonies and the 
mother-country. 

Now, the one quality which has made the 
Greeks so distinguished in the world’s history 
was their curiosity ; and it was natural that they 
should desire to know, and to put on record, 
the large amount of information brought to 
the mainland of Greece from the innumerable 
Greek colonies. But to record geographical 
knowledge, the first thing that is necessary is a 
map, and accordingly it is a Greek philosopher 
named Anaximander, of Miletus, of the sixth 
century b. c., to whom we owe the invention of 
map-drawing. Now, in order to make a map of 
one’s own country,! little astronomical knowledge 
is required. As we have seen, savages are able 
to draw such maps; but when it comes to 
describing the relative positions of countries 
divided from one another by seas, the problem 
is not so easy. An Athenian would know 
roughly that Byzantium (now called Constanti¬ 
nople) was somewhat to the east and to the 
north of him, because in sailing thither he would 
have to sail towards the rising sun, and would 
find the climate getting colder as he approached 
Byzantium. So, too, he might roughly guess that 
Marseilles was somewhere to the west and north 
of him ; but how was he to fix the relative position 
of Marseilles and Byzantium to one another? 
Was Marseilles more northerly than Byzantium? 
Was it very far away from that city? For 
though it took longer to get to Marseilles, the 


2 2 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DiSCOVERY. 

voyage was winding, and might possibly bring 
the vessel comparatively near to Byzantium, 
though there might be no direct road between 
the two cities. There was one rough way of 
determining how far north a place stood: the 
very slightest observation of the starry heavens 
would show a traveller that as he moved 
towards the north, the pole-star rose higher 
up in the heavens. How much higher, could 
be determined by the angle formed by a stick 
pointing to the pole-star, in relation to one 
held horizontally. If, instead of two sticks, 
we cut out a piece of metal or wood to fill up 
the enclosed angle, we get the earliest form of 
the sun-dial, known as the gnomon , and accord¬ 
ing to the shape of the gnomon the latitude 
of a place is determined. Accordingly, it is 
not surprising to find that the invention of the 
gnomon is also attributed to Anaximander, for 
without some such instrument it would have 
been impossible for him to have made any 
map worthy of the name. But it is probable 
that Anaximander did not so much invent as 
introduce the gnomon, and, indeed, Herodotus 
expressly states that this instrument was de¬ 
rived from the Babylonians, who were the 
earliest astronomers, so far as we know. A 
curious point confirms this, for the measure¬ 
ment of angles is by degrees, and degrees are 
divided into sixty seconds, just as minutes are. 
Now this division into sixty is certainly derived 
from Babylonia in the case of time measurement, 
and is therefore of the same origin as regards the 
measurement of angles. 

We have no longer any copy of this first 
map of the world drawn up by Anaximander, 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 23 

but there is little doubt that it formed the 
foundation of a similar map drawn by a 
fellow-townsman of Anaximander, Hecat^eus 
of Miletus, who seems to have written the first 
formal geography. Only fragments of this are 
extant, but from them we are able to see that it 
was of the nature of a periplus , or seaman’s 
guide, telling how many days’ sail it was from 
one point to another, and in what direction. We 
know also that he arranged his whole subject 
into two books, dealing respectively with Europe 
and Asia, under which latter term he included 
part of what we now know as Africa. From the 
fragments scholars have been able to reproduce 
the rough outlines of the map of the world as it 
presented itself to Hecataeus. From this it can 
be seen that the Homeric conception of the sur¬ 
rounding ocean formed a chief determining feature 
in Hecatseus’s map. For the rest, he was 
acquainted with the Mediterranean, Red, and 
Black Seas, and with the great rivers Danube, 
Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, and Indus. 

The next great name in the history of Greek 
geography is that of Herodotus of Halicar¬ 
nassus, who might indeed be equally well called 
the Father of Geography as the Father of His¬ 
tory. He travelled much in Egypt, Babylonia, 
Persia, and on the shores of the Black Sea, 
while he was acquainted with Greece, and passed 
the latter years of his life in South Italy. On all 
these countries he gave his fellow-citizens accu¬ 
rate and tolerably full information, and he had 
diligently collected knowledge about countries 
in their neighbourhood. In particular he gives 
full details of Scythia (or Southern Russia), and 
of the satrapies and royal roads of Persia. As a 


24 the story of geographical discovery. 

rule, his information is as accurate as could be 
expected at such an early date, and he rarely tells 
marvellous stories, or if he does, he points out 
himself their untrustworthiness. Almost the 
only traveller's yarn which Herodotus reports 
without due scepticism is that of the ants of India 
that were bigger than foxes and burrowed out 
gold dust for their ant-hill. 

One of the stories he relates is of interest, 
as seeming to show an anticipation of one 
of Mr. Stanley’s journeys. Five young men of 
the Nasamonians started from Southern Libya, 
W. of the Soudan, and journeyed for many 
days west till they came to a grove of trees, 
when they were seized by a number of men 
of very small stature, and conducted through 
marshes to a great city of black men of the 
same size, through which a large river flowed. 
This Herodotus identifies with the Nile, but, 
from the indication of the journey given by him, 
it would seem more probable that it was the 
Niger, and that the Nasamonians had visited 
Timbuctoo ! Owing to this statement of Herod¬ 
otus, it was for long thought that the Upper Nile 
flowed east and west. 

After Herodotus, the date of whose history 
may be fixed at the easily remembered number 
of 444 b. c., a large increase of knowledge was 
obtained of the western part of Asia by the 
two expeditions of Xenophon and of Alexander, 
which brought the familiar knowledge of the 
Greeks as far as India. But besides these 
military expeditions we have still extant several 
log-books of mariners, which might have added 
considerably to Greek geography. One of these 
tells the tale of an expedition of the Cartha- 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 25, 

ginian admiral named Hanno, down the western 
coast of Africa, as far as Sierra Leone, a voyage 
which was not afterwards undertaken for sixteen 
hundred years. Hanno brought back from this 
voyage hairy skins, which, he stated, belonged 
to men and women whom he had captured, 
and who were known to the natives by the 
name of Gorillas. Another log-book is that 
of a Greek named Scylax, who gives the sailing 
distances between nearly all ports on the Medi¬ 
terranean and Black Seas, and the number of 
days required to pass from one to another. 
From this it would seem that a Greek merchant 
vessel could manage on the average fifty miles 
a day. Besides this, one of Alexander’s 
admirals, named Nearchus, learned to carry 
his ships from the mouth of the Indus to 
the Arabian Gulf. Later on, a Greek sailor, 
Hippalus, found out that by using the monsoons 
at the appropriate times, he could sail direct 
from Arabia to India without laboriously coast¬ 
ing along the shores of Persia and Beluchistan, 
and in consequence the Greeks gave his name 
to the monsoon. For information about India 
itself, the Greeks were, for a long time, depen¬ 
dent upon the account of Megasthenes, an am¬ 
bassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s 
generals, to the Indian king of the Punjab. 

While knowledge was thus gained of the East, 
additional information was obtained about the 
north of Europe by the travels of one Pytheas, 
a native of Marseilles, who flourished about the 
time of Alexander the Great (333 b. c.), and 
he is especially interesting to us as having been 
the first civilised person who can be identified 
as having visited Britain. He seems to have 


26 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

coasted along the Bay of Biscay, to have spent 
some time in England,—which he reckoned as 
40,000 stadia (4000 miles) in circumference, 
—and he appears also to have coasted along 
Belgium and Holland, as far as the mouth of 
the Elbe. Pytheas is, however, chiefly known 
in the history of geography as having referred 
to the island of Thule, which he described as 
the most northerly point of the inhabited earth, 
beyond which the sea became thickened, and 
of a jelly-like consistency. He does not profess 
to have visited Thule, and his account prob¬ 
ably refers to the existence of drift ice near the 
Shetlands. 

All this new information was gathered to¬ 
gether, and made accessible to the Greek reading 
world, by Eratosthenes, librarian of Alex¬ 
andria (240-196 b. c.), who was practically the 
founder of scientific geography. He was the first 
to attempt any accurate measurement of the size 
of the earth, and of its inhabited portion. By 
his time the scientific men of Greece had become 
quite aware of the fact that the earth was a 
globe, though they considered that it was fixed 
in space at the centre of the universe. Guesses 
had even been made at the size of this globe, 
Aristotle fixing its circumference at 400,000 
stadia (or 40,000 miles), but Eratosthenes at¬ 
tempted a more accurate measurement. He 
compared the length of the shadow thrown by 
the sun at Alexandria and at Syene, near the 
first cataract of the Nile, which he assumed to be 
on the same meridian of longitude, and to be at 
about 5000 stadia (500 miles) distance. From 
the difference in the length of the shadows he 
deduced that this distance represented one-fiftieth 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 27 

of the circumference of the earth, which would 
accordingly be about 250,000 stadia, or 25,000 
geographical miles. As the actual circumference 
is 24,899 English miles, this was a very near 
approximation, considering the rough means 
Eratosthenes had at his disposal. 

Having thus estimated the size of the earth, 
Eratosthenes then went on to determine the size 
of that portion which the ancients considered to 
be habitable. North and south of the lands 
known to him, Eratosthenes and all the ancients 
considered to be either too cold or too hot to be 
habitable ; this portion he reckoned to extend to 
38,000 stadia, or 3800 miles. In reckoning the 
extent of the habitable portion from east to 
west, Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that 
from the Straits of Gibraltar to the east of India 
was about 80,000 stadia, or, roughly speaking, one- 
third of the earth’s surface. The remaining two- 
thirds were supposed to be covered by the ocean, 
and Eratosthenes prophetically remarked that “ if 
it were not that the vast extent of the Atlantic 
Sea rendered it impossible, one might almost 
sail from the coast of Spain to that of India 
along the same parallel.” Sixteen hundred years 
later, as we shall see, Columbus tried to carryout 
this idea. Eratosthenes based his calculations on 
two fundamental lines, corresponding in a way 
to our equator and meridian of Greenwich : the 
first stretched, according to him, from Cape St. 
Vincent, through the Straits of Messina and the 
island of Rhodes, to Issus (Gulf of Iskanderun); 
for his starting-line in reckoning north and south 
he used a meridian passing through the First 
Cataract, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Byzantium. 

The next two hundred years after Eratos' 


28 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

thenes’ death was filled up by the spread of the 
Roman Empire, by the taking overby the Romans 
of the vast possessions previously held by Alex¬ 
ander and his successors and by the Carthaginians, 
and by their spread into Gaul, Britain, and Ger¬ 
many. Much of the increased knowledge thus 
obtained was summed up in the geographical 
work of Strabo, who wrote in Greek about 20 
b. c. He introduced from the extra knowledge 
thus obtained many modifications of the system 
of Eratosthenes, but, on the whole, kept to his 
general conception of the world. He rejected, 
however, the existence of Thule, and thus made 
the world narrower; while he recognised the exist¬ 
ence of Ierne, or Ireland, which he regarded as 
the most northerly part of the habitable world, 
lying, as he thought, north of Britain. 

Between the time of Strabo and that of Ptole¬ 
my, who sums up all the knowledge of the ancients 
about the habitable earth, there was only one con¬ 
siderable addition to men’s acquaintance with 
their neighbours, contained in a seaman’s manual 
for the navigation of the Indian Ocean, known as 
the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. This gave 
very full and tolerably accurate accounts of the 
coasts from Aden to the mouth of the Ganges, 
though it regarded Ceylon as much greater, and 
more to the south, than it really is; but it also 
contains an account of the more easterly parts of 
Asia, Indo-China, and China itself, “ where the silk 
comes from.” This had an important influence 
on the views of Ptolemy, as we shall see, and in- 
directly helped long afterwards to the discovery 
of America. 

It was left to Ptolemy of Alexandria to sum 
up for the ancient world all the knowledge that 


PTOLEMAEI ORBIS 



Mod 1 14-0.000.000 
































30 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

had been accumulating from the time of Erastos- 
thenes to his own day, which we may fix at about 
150 a.d. He took all the information he could 
find in the writings of the preceding four hundred 
years, and reduced it all to one uniform scale ; for 
it is to him that we owe the invention of the 
method and the names of latitude and longitude. 
Previous writers had been content to say that the 
distance between one point and another was so 
many stadia, but he reduced all this rough reckon¬ 
ing to so many degrees of latitude and longitude, 
from fixed lines as starting-points. But, unfor¬ 
tunately, all these reckonings were rough calcula¬ 
tions, which are almost invariably beyond the truth; 
and Ptolemy, though the greatest of ancient astron¬ 
omers, still further distorted his results by assum¬ 
ing that a degree was 500 stadia, or 50 geograph¬ 
ical miles. Thus when he found in any of his 
authorities that the distance between one port and 
another was 500 stadia, he assumed, in the first 
place, that this was accurate, and, in the second, 
that the distance between the tw’o places was equal 
to a degree of latitude or longitude, as the case 
might be. Accordingly he arrived at the result 
that the breadth of the habitable globe was, as he 
put it, twelve hours of longitude (corresponding to 
180 0 )—nearly one-third as much again as the real 
dimensions from Spain to China. The consequence 
of this was that the distance from Spain to China 
westward was correspondingly diminished by sixty 
degrees (or nearly 4000 miles), and it was this 
error that ultimately encouraged Columbus to 
attempt his epoch-making voyage. 

Ptolemy’s errors of calculation would not have 
been so extensive but that he adopted a method 
of measurement which made them accumulative. 


THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS. 31 

If he had chosen Alexandria for the point of de¬ 
parture in measuring longitude, the errors he made 
when reckoning westward would have been coun¬ 
terbalanced by those reckoning eastward, and 
would not have resulted in any serious distortion 
of the truth ; but instead of this, he adopted as his 
point of departure the Fortunatae Insulae, or Cana¬ 
ry Islands, and every degree measured to the east 
of these was one-fifth too great, since he assumed 
that it was only fifty miles in length. I may men¬ 
tion that so great has been the influence of Ptole¬ 
my on geography, that, up to the middle of the 
eighteenth century, Ferro, in the Canary Islands, 
was still retained as the zero-point of the meridi¬ 
ans of longitude. 

Another point in which Ptolemy’s system 
strongly influenced modern opinion was his de¬ 
parture from the previous assumption that the 
world was surrounded by the ocean, derived from 
Homer. Instead of Africa being thus cut through 
the middle by the ocean, Ptolemy assumed, pos¬ 
sibly from vague traditional knowledge, that 
Africa extended an unknown length to the south, 
and joined on to an equally unknown continent 
far to the east, which, in the Latinised versions of 
his astronomical work, was termed “ terra aus¬ 
tralis incognita,” or “the unknown southland.” 
As, by his error with regard to the breadth of the 
earth, Ptolemy led to Columbus ; so, by his mis¬ 
taken notions as to the “ great south land,” he 
prepared the way for the discoveries of Captain 
Cook. But notwithstanding these errors, which 
were due partly to the roughness of the materials 
which he had to deal with, and partly to scientific 
caution, Ptolemy’s work is one of the great mon¬ 
uments of human industry and knowledge. For 


32 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

the Old World it remained the basis of geograph¬ 
ical knowledge up to the beginning of the eight¬ 
eenth century, just as his astronomical work was 
only finally abolished by the work of Newton. 
Ptolemy has thus the rare distinction of being the 
greatest authority on two important departments 
of human knowledge—astronomy and geography 
—for over fifteen hundred years. Into the details 
of his description of the world it is unnecessary 
to go. The map will indicate how near he came 
to the main outlines of the Mediterranean, of 
Northwest Europe, of Arabia, and of the Black 
Sea. Beyond these regions he could only depend 
upon the rough indications and guesses of un¬ 
tutored merchants. But it is worth while refer¬ 
ring to his method of determining latitude, as it 
was followed up by most succeeding geographers. 
Between the equator and the most northerly point 
known to him, he divides up the earth into hor¬ 
izontal strips, called by him “ climates,” and 
determined by the average length of the longest 
day in each. This is a very rough method of 
determining latitude, but it was probably, inmost 
cases, all that Ptolemy had to depend upon, since 
the measurement of angles would be a rare ac¬ 
complishment even in modern times, and would 
only exist among a few mathematicians and 
astronomers in Ptolemy’s days. With him the 
history of geographical knowledge and discovery 
in the ancient world closes. 

In this chapter I have roughly given the 
names and exploits of the Greek men of science, 
who summed up in a series of systematic records 
the knowledge obtained by merchants, by soldiers, 
and by travellers of the extent of the world 
known to the ancients. Of this knowledge, by 


THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST. 


33 


far the largest amount was gained, not by syste¬ 
matic investigation for the purpose of geography, 
but by military expeditions for the purpose of 
conquest. We must now retrace our steps, and 
give a rough review of the various stages of con¬ 
quest by which the different regions of the Old 
World became known to the Greeks and the 
Roman Empire, whose knowledge Ptolemy sum¬ 
marises. 


[.Authorities : Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, 2 
vols., 1879 ; Tozer, History of Ancient Geography , 1897.] 


CHAPTER II. 

THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST IN THE 
ANCIENT WORLD. 

In a companion volume of this series, “ The 
Story of Extinct Civilisations in the East,” will 
be found an account of the rise and development 
of the various nations who held sway over the 
west of Asia at the dawn of history. Modern 
discoveries of remarkable interest have enabled 
us to learn the condition of men in Asia Minor 
as early as 4000 b.c. All these early civilisations 
existed on the banks of great rivers, which ren¬ 
dered the land fertile through which they passed. 

We first find man conscious of himself, and 
putting his knowledge on record, along the banks 
of the great rivers Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris, 
Ganges and Yang-tse-Kiang. But for our pur¬ 
poses we are not concerned with these very early 
stages of history. The Egyptians got to know 
3 


34 THE story of geographical discovery. 

something of the nations that surrounded them, 
and so did the Assyrians. A summary of similar 
knowledge is contained in the list of tribes given 
in the tenth chapter of Genesis, which divides all 
mankind, as then known to the Hebrews, into 
descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet—corre¬ 
sponding, roughly, to Asia, Europe, and Africa. 
But in order to ascertain how the Romans ob¬ 
tained the mass of information which was sum- 
V . marised for them by Ptolemy in his great work, 
we have merely to concentrate our attention on 
the remarkable process of continuous expansion 
which ultimately led to the existence of the Roman 
Empire. 

All early histories of kingdoms are practically 
of the same type. A certain tract of country is 
divided up among a certain number of tribes 
speaking a common language, and each of these 
tribes ruled by a separate chieftain. One of these 
tribes then becomes predominant over the rest, 
through the skill in war or diplomacy of one of 
its chiefs, and the whole of the tract of country is 
thus organised into one kingdom. Thus the his¬ 
tory of England relates how the kingdom of Wes¬ 
sex grew into predominance over the whole of the 
country ; that of France tells how the kings who 
ruled over the Isle of France spread their rule 
over the rest of the land ; the history of Israel is 
mainly an account of how the tribe of Judah 
obtained the hegemony of the rest of the tribes; 
and Roman history, as its name implies, informs 
us how the inhabitants of a single city grew to 
be the masters of the whole known world. But 
their empire had been prepared for them by a long 
series of similar expansions, which might be de¬ 
scribed as the successive swallowing up of empire 



THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST. 


35 


after empire, each becoming overgrown in the 
process, till at last the series was concluded by 
the Romans swallowing up the whole. It was this 
gradual spread of dominion which, at each stage, 
increased men’s knowledge of surrounding nations, 
and it therefore comes within our province to 
roughly sum up these stages, as part of the story 
of geographical discovery. 

Regarded from the point of view of geography, 
this spread of man’s knowledge might be com¬ 
pared to the growth of a huge oyster-shell, and, 
from that point of view, we have to take the 
north of the Persian Gulf as the apex of the shell, 
and begin with the Babylonian Empire. We first 
have the kingdom of Babylon—which, in the early 
stages, might be best termed Chaldaea—in the 
south of Mesopotamia (or the valley between the 
two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates), which, during 
the third and second millennia before our era, 
spread along the valley of the Tigris. But in the 
fourteenth century b.c., the Assyrians to the north 
of it, though previously dependent upon Babylon, 
conquered it, and, after various vicissitudes, estab¬ 
lished themselves throughout the whole of Meso¬ 
potamia and much of the surrounding lands. In 
604 b.c. the capital of this great empire was moved 
once more to Babylon, so that in the last stage, as 
well as in the first, it may be called Babylonia. For 
purposes of distinction, however, it will be as well 
to call these three successive stages Chaldaea, 
Assyria, and Babylonia. 

Meanwhile, immediately to the east, a some¬ 
what similar process had been gone through, 
though here the development was from north to 
south, the Medes of the north developing a power¬ 
ful empire in the north of Persia, which ultimately 


36 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

fell into the hands of Cyrus the Great in 546 b.c. 
He then proceeded to conquer the kingdom of 
Lydia, in the north-west part of Asia Minor, which 
had previously inherited the dominions of the 
Hittites. Finally he proceeded to seize the em¬ 
pire of Babylonia, by his successful attack on the 
•capital, 538 b.c. He extended his rule nearly as 
far as India on one side, and, as we know from 
the Bible, to the borders of Egypt on the other. 
His son Cambyses even succeeded in adding Egypt 
for a time to the Persian Empire. The oyster- 
shell of history had accordingly expanded to in¬ 
clude almost the whole of Western Asia. 

The next two centuries are taken up in uni¬ 
versal history by the magnificent struggle of the 
Greeks against the Persian Empire—the most 
decisive conflict in all history, for it determined 
whether Europe or Asia should conquer the world. 
Hitherto the course of conquest had been from 
east to west, and if Xerxes’ invasion had been 
successful, there is little doubt that the westward 
tendency would have continued. But the larger 
the tract of country which an empire covers— 
especially when different tribes and nations are 
included in it—the weaker and less organised it 
becomes. Within little more than a century of 
the death of Cyrus the Great the Greeks discov¬ 
ered the vulnerable point in the Persian Empire, 
owing to an expedition of ten thousand Greek mer¬ 
cenaries under Xenophon, who had been engaged 
by Cyrus the younger in an attempt to capture the 
Persian Empire from his brother. Cyrus was 
slain, 401 b.c., but the ten thousand, under the 
leadership of Xenophon, were enabled to hold their 
•own against all the attempts of the Persians to 
^destroy them, and found their way back to Greece. 


THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST. 


37 


Meanwhile the usual process had been goings 
on in Greece by which a country becomes consol¬ 
idated. From time to time one of the tribes into 
which that mountainous country was divided,, 
obtained supremacy over the rest: at first the 
Athenians, owing to the prominent part they had 
taken in repelling the Persians; then the Spartans,, 
and finally the Thebans. But on the northern 
frontiers a race of hardy mountaineers, the Mace¬ 
donians, had consolidated their power, and, under 
Philip of Macedon, became masters of all Greece. 
Philip had learned the lesson taught by the suc¬ 
cessful retreat of the ten thousand, and, just 
before his death, was preparing to attack the 
Great King (of Persia) with all the forces which 
his supremacy in Greece put at his disposal. His 
son Alexander the Great carried out Philip’s in¬ 
tentions. Within twelve years (334-323 b.c.) he 
had conquered Persia,Parthia, India (in the strict 
sense, i.e. the valley of the Indus), and Egypt. 
After his death his huge empire was divided up 
among his generals, but, except in the extreme 
east, the whole of it was administered on Greek 
methods. A Greek-speaking person could pass- 
from one end to the other without difficulty, and 
we can understand how a knowledge of the whole 
tract of country between the Adriatic and the Indus- 
could be obtained by Greek scholars. Alexander 
founded a large number of cities, all bearing his 
name, at various points of his itinerary; but of 
these the most important was that at the mouth 
of the Nile, known to this day as Alexandria. 
Here was the intellectual centre of the whole 
Hellenic world, and accordingly it was here, as 
we have seen, that Eratosthenes first wrote down 
in a systematic manner all the knowledge about 


38 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

the habitable earth which had been gained mainly 
by Alexander’s conquests. 

Important as was the triumphant march of 
Alexander through Western Asia, both in history 
and in geography, it cannot be said to have added 
so very much to geographical knowledge, for 
Herodotus was roughly acquainted with most of 
the country thus traversed, except towards the 
east of Persia and the north-west of India. But 
the itineraries of Alexander and his generals must 
have contributed more exact knowledge of the 
distances between the various important centres 
of population, and enabled Eratosthenes and his 
successors to give them a definite position on their 
maps of the world. What they chiefly learned 
from Alexander and his immediate successors was 
a more accurate knowledge of North-West India. 
Even as late as Strabo, the sole knowledge pos¬ 
sessed at Alexandria of Indian places was that 
given by Megasthenes, the ambassador to India 
in the third century b.c. 

Meanwhile, in the western portion of the civi¬ 
lised world a similar process had gone on. In 
the Italian peninsula the usual struggle had gone 
on between the various tribes inhabiting it. The 
fertile plain of Lombardy was not in those days 
regarded as belonging to Italy, but was known as 
Cisalpine Gaul. The south of Italy, as we have 
seen, was mainly inhabited by Greek colonists, 
and was called Great Greece. Between these 
tracts of country the Italian territory was inhab¬ 
ited by three sets of federate tribes—the Etrurians, 
the Samnites, and the Latins. During the 230 
years between 510 b.c. and 280 b.c. Rome was 
occupied in obtaining the supremacy among these 
three sets of tribes, and by the latter date may be 


THE SPREAD OF CONQUEST. 


39 


regarded as having consolidated Central Italy into 
an Italian federation, centralised at Rome. At 
the latter date, the Greek king, Pyrrhus of Epirus, 
attempted to arouse the Greek colonies in South¬ 
ern Italy against the growing power of Rome; but 
his interference only resulted in extending the 
Roman dominion down to the heel and big toe of 
Italy. 

If Rome was to advance farther, Sicily would 
be the next step, and just at that moment Sicily 
was being threatened by the other great power of 
the West—Carthage. Carthage was the most im¬ 
portant of the colonies founded by the Phoenicians 
(probably in the ninth century b.c.), and pursued 
in the Western Mediterranean the policy of estab¬ 
lishing trading stations along the coast, which had 
distinguished the Phoenicians from their first ap¬ 
pearance in history. They seized all the islands 
in that division of the sea, or at any rate prevented 
any other nation from settling in Corsica, Sar¬ 
dinia, and the Balearic Isles. In particular, Car¬ 
thage took possession of the western part of Sicily, 
which had been settled by sister Phoenician colo¬ 
nies. While Rome did everything in its power to 
consolidate its conquests by admitting the other 
Italians to some share in the central government, 
Carthage only regarded its foreign possessions as 
so many openings for trade. In fact, it dealt with 
the western littoral of the Mediterranean some¬ 
thing like the East India Company treated the 
coast of Hindustan: it established factories at 
convenient spots. But just as the East India 
Company found it necessary to conquer the neigh¬ 
bouring territory in order to secure peaceful trade, 
so Carthage extended its conquests all down the 
western coast of Africa and the south-east part of 


40 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Spain, while Rome was extending into Italy. To 
continue our conchological analogy, by the time 
.of the first Punic War Rome and Carthage had 
each expanded into a shell, and between the two 
intervened the eastern section of the island of 
.Sicily. As the result of this, Rome became mas¬ 
ter of Sicily, and then the final struggle took place 
with Hannibal in the second Punic War, which re¬ 
sulted in Rome becoming possessed of Spain and 
Carthage. By the year 200 b.c. Rome was prac¬ 
tically master of the Western Mediterranean, 
though it took another century to consolidate its 
heritage from Carthage in Spain and Mauritania. 
During that century—the second before our era— 
Rome also extended its Italian boundaries to the 
Alps by the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul, which, 
however, was considered outside Italy, from which 
it was separated by the river Rubicon. In that 
•same century the Romans had begun to interfere 
in the affairs of Greece, which easily fell into their 
hands, and thus prepared the way for their inher¬ 
itance of Alexander’s empire. 

This, in the main, was the work of the first 
•century before our era, when the expansion of 
Rome became practically concluded. This was 
mainly the work of two men, Caesar and Pompey. 
Following the example of his uncle, Marius, 
Caesar extended the Roman dominions beyond 
the Alps to Gaul, Western Germany, and Britain; 
but from our present standpoint it was Pompey 
who prepared the way for Rome to carry on the 
•succession of empire in the more civilised por¬ 
tions of the world, and thereby merited his title 
of “Great.” He pounded up, as it were, the va¬ 
rious states into which Asia Minor was divided, 
and thus prepared the way for Roman dominion 







































42 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

over Western Asia and Egypt. By the time of 
Ptolemy the empire was thorougly consolidated, 
and his map and geographical notices are only 
tolerably accurate within the confines of the em¬ 
pire. 

One of the means by which the Romans were 
enabled to consolidate their dominion must be 
here shortly referred to. In order that their 
legions might easily pass from one portion of this 
huge empire to another, they built roads, general¬ 
ly in straight lines, and so solidly constructed that 
in many places throughout Europe they can be 
traced even to the present day, after the lapse of 
fifteen hundred years. Owing to them, in a large 
measure, Rome was enabled to preserve its empire 
intact for nearly five hundred years, and even to 
this day one can trace a difference in the civiliza¬ 
tion of those countries over which Rome once 
ruled, except where the devastating influence of 
Islam has passed like a sponge over the old Ro¬ 
man provinces. Civilisation, or the art of living 
together in society, is practically the result of 
Roman law, and in this sense all roads in history 
lead to Rome. 

The work of Claudius Ptolemy sums up to us 
the knowledge that the Romans had gained b} T 
their inheritance, on the western side, of the Car¬ 
thaginian empire, and, on the eastern, of the re¬ 
mains of Alexander’s empire, to which must be 
added the conquests of Caesar in North-West Eu¬ 
rope. Caesar is, indeed, the connecting link be¬ 
tween the two shells that had been growing 
throughout ancient history. He added Gaul, 
Germany, and Britain to geographical knowledge, 
and, by his struggle with Pompey, connected the 
Levant with his northerly conquests. One result 


GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


43 


of his imperial work must be here referred to. 
By bringing all civilised men under one rule, he 
prepared them for the worship of one God. This 
was not without its influence on travel and geo¬ 
graphical discovery, for the great barrier between 
mankind had always been the difference of re¬ 
ligion, and Rome, by breaking down the exclu¬ 
siveness of local religions, and substituting for 
them a general worship of the majesty of the 
Emperor, enabled all the inhabitants of this vast 
empire to feel a certain communion with one an¬ 
other, which ultimately, as we know, took on a 
religious form. 

The Roman Empire will henceforth form the 
centre from which to regard any additions to 
geographical knowledge. As we shall see, part 
of the knowledge acquired by the Romans was 
lost in the Dark Ages succeeding the break-up 
of the empire; but for our purposes this may be 
neglected, and geographical discovery in the suc¬ 
ceeding chapters may be roughly taken to be ad¬ 
ditions and corrections of the knowledge summed 
up by Claudius Ptolemy. 


CHAPTER III. 

GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 

We have seen how, by a slow process of con¬ 
quest and expansion, the ancient world got to 
know a large part of the Eastern Hemisphere, 
and how this knowledge was summed up in the 
great work of Claudius Ptolemy. We have now 
to learn how much of this knowledge was lost or 


44 THE story of geographical discovery. 

perverted—how geography, for a time, lost the 
character of a science, and became once more the 
subject of mythical fancies similar to those which 
we found in its earliest stages. Instead of knowl¬ 
edge which, if not quite exact, was at any rate 
approximately measured, the mediaeval teachers 
who concerned themselves with the configuration 
of the inhabited world substituted their own ideas 
of what ought to be.* This is a process which ap¬ 
plies not alone to geography, but to all branches 
of knowledge, which, after the fall of the Roman 
Empire, ceased to expand or progress, became 
mixed up with fanciful notions, and only recov¬ 
ered when a knowledge of ancient science and 
thought was restored in the fifteenth century. 
But in geography we can more easily see than 
in other sciences the exact nature of the disturb¬ 
ing influence which prevented the acquisition' of 
new knowledge. 

Briefly put, that disturbing influence was 
religion, or rather theology; not, of course, 
religion in the proper sense of the word, or the¬ 
ology based on critical principles, but theological 
conceptions deduced from a slavish adherence to 
texts of Scripture, very often seriously misunder¬ 
stood. To quote a single example : when it is 
said in Ezekiel v. 5, “This is Jerusalem: I have 
set it in the midst of the nations . . . round 
about her,” this was not taken by the mediaeval 
monks, who were the chief geographers of the 
period, as a poetical statement, but as an exact 
mathematical law, which determined the form 


It is fair to add that Professor Miller’s researches have 
shown that some of the “ unscientific ” qualities of the mediteval 
mappa mundi were due to Roman models. 




GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 45 

which all mediaeval maps took. Roughly speak¬ 
ing, of course, there was a certain amount of 
truth in the statement, since Jerusalem would be 
abo # ut the centre of the world as known to the 
ancients—at least, measured from east to west; 
but, at the same time, the mediaeval geographers 
adopted the old Homeric idea of the ocean sur¬ 
rounding the habitable world, though at times 
there was a tendency to keep more closely to the 
words of Scripture about the four corners of the 
earth. Still, as a rule, the orthodox conception 
of the world was that of a circle enclosing a sort 
of T square, the east being placed at the top, 
Jerusalem in the centre; the Mediterranean Sea 
naturally divided the lower half of the circle, 
while the ^Egean and Red Seas were regarded as 
spreading out right and left perpendicularly, thus 
dividing the top part of the world, or Asia, from 
the lower part, divided equally between Europe 
on the left and Africa on the right. The size of 
the Mediterranean Sea, it will be seen, thus deter¬ 
mined the dimensions of the three continents. 
One of the chief errors to which this led was to 
cut off the whole of the south of Africa, which 
rendered it seemingly a short voyage round that 
continent on the way to India. As we shall see, 
this error had important and favourable results 
on geographical discovery. 

Another result of this conception of the world 
as a T within an O, was to expand Asia to an 
enormous extent; and as this was a part of the 
world which was less known to the monkish map- 
makers of the Middle Ages, they were obliged to 
fill out their ignorance by their imagination. 
Hence they located in Asia all the legends which 
they had derived either from Biblical or classical 


46 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY, 

sources. Thus there was a conception, for whicli 
very little basis is to be found in the Bible, of two 
fierce nations named Gog and Magog, who would 
one day bring about the destruction of the civ¬ 
ilised world. These were located in what would 



have been Siberia, and it was thought that Alex¬ 
ander the Great had penned them in behind the 
Iron Mountains. When the great Tartar invasion 
came in the thirteenth century, it was natural to 
suppose that these were no less than the Gog and 
Magog of legend. So, too, the position of Para¬ 
dise was fixed in the extreme east, or, in other 
words, at the top of mediaeval maps. Then, 
again, some of the classical authorities, as Pliny 
and Solinus, had admitted into their geographical 
accounts legends of strange tribes of monstrous 
men, strangely different from normal humanity. 
Among these may be mentioned the Sciapodes, or 
men whose feet were so large that when it was 






GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


47 


hot they could rest on their backs and lie in the 
shade. There is a dim remembrance of these 
monstrosities in Shakespeare’s reference to 

“ The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders.” 

In the mythical travels of Sir John Maunde- 
ville there are illustrations of these curious be¬ 
ings, one of which is here reproduced. Other 
tracts of country were supposed to be inhabited 
by equally monstrous animals. Illustrations of 
most of these were utilised to fill up the many 
vacant spaces in the mediaeval maps of Asia. 

One author, indeed, in his theological zeal, 
went much further in modifying the conceptions 
of the habitable world. A Christian merchant 
named Cosmas, who had journeyed to India, and 
was accordingly known as Cosmas Indico- 
pleustes, wrote, about 540 a.d., a work entitled 
“ Christian Topography,” to confound what he 
thought to be the erroneous views of Pagan 
authorities about the configuration of the world. 
What especially roused his ire was the conception 
of the spherical form of the earth, and of the 
Antipodes, or men who could stand upside down. 
He drew a picture of a round ball, with four men 
standing upon it, with their feet on opposite 
sides, and asked triumphantly how it was possible 
that all four could stand upright? In answer to 
those who asked him to explain how he could 
account for day and night if the sun did not go 
round the earth, he supposed that there was a 
huge mountain in the extreme north, round which 
the sun moved once in every twenty-four hours. 
Night was when the sun was going round the 
other side of the mountain. He also proved, en- 


48 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

tirely to his own satisfaction, that the sun, in¬ 
stead of being greater, was very much smaller 
than the earth. The earth was, according to 
him, a moderately sized plane, the inhabited parts 



of which were separated from the antediluvian 
world by the ocean, and at the four corners of the 
whole were the pillars which supported the heav¬ 
ens, so that the whole universe was something like 
a big glass exhibition case, on the top of which 
was the firmament, dividing the waters above and 
below it, according to the first chapter of Genesis. 

















GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


49 


Cosmas’ views, however interesting and amus¬ 
ing they are, were too extreme to gain much 
credence or attention even from the mediaeval 
monks, and we find no reference to them in the 
various mappce mundi which sum ilp their knowl¬ 
edge, or rather ignorance, about the world. One 
of the most remarkable of these maps exists in 
England at Hereford, and the plan of it given on 
p. 48 will convey as much information as to early 
mediaeval geography as the ordinary reader will 
require. In the extreme east, i.e. at the top, is 
represented the Terrestrial Paradise; in the 
centre is Jerusalem; beneath this, the Mediter¬ 
ranean extends to the lower edge of the map, 
with its islands very carefully particularised. 
Much attention is given to the rivers throughout, 
but very little to the mountains. The only real 
increase of actual knowledge represented in the 
map is that of the north-east of Europe, which 
had naturally become better known by the inva¬ 
sion of the Norsemen. But how little real knowl¬ 
edge was possessed of this portion of Europe is 
proved by the fact that the map-maker placed 
near Norway the Cynocephali, or dog-headed 
men, probably derived from some confused ac¬ 
counts of Indian monkeys. Near them are placed 
the Gryphons, “ men most wicked, for among 
their misdeeds they also make garments for them¬ 
selves and their horses out of the skins of their 
enemies.” Here, too, is placed the home of the 
Seven Sleepers, who lived for ever as a standing 
miracle to convert the heathen. The shape given 
to the British Islands will be observed as due to 
the necessity of keeping the circular form of the 
inhabited world. Other details about England 
we may leave for the present. 

4 


50 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

It is obvious that maps such as the Hereford 
one would be of no practical utility to travellers 
who desired to pass from one country to another; 
indeed, they were not intended for any such pur¬ 
pose. Geography had ceased to be in any sense 
a practical science ; it only ministered to men’s 
sense of wonder, and men studied it mainly in 
order to learn about the marvels of the world. 
When William of Wykeham drew up his rules for 
the Fellows and Scholars of New College, Oxford, 
he directed them in the long winter evenings to 
occupy themselves with “ singing, or reciting 
poetry, or with the chronicles of the different 
kingdoms, or with the wonders of the world." 
Hence almost all mediaeval maps are filled up 
with pictures of these wonders, which were the 
more necessary as so few people could read. A 
curious survival of this custom lasted on in map¬ 
drawing almost to the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, when the spare places in the ocean were 
adorned with pictures of sailing ships or spouting 
sea monsters. 

When men desired to travel, they did not use 
such maps as these, but rather itineraries, or road¬ 
books, which did not profess to give the shape of 
the countries through which a traveller would 
pass, but only indicated the chief towns on the 
most-frequented roads. This information was 
really derived from classical times, for the Roman 
emperors from time to time directed such road¬ 
books to be drawn up, and there still remains an 
almost complete itinerary of the Empire, known 
as the Peutinger Table, from the name of the 
German merchant who first drew the attention of 
the learned world to it. A condensed reproduc¬ 
tion is given on the following page, from which it 





I 


The Peutinger table-Western part. 




























































































52 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

will be seen that no attempt is made to give any¬ 
thing more than the roads and towns. Unfortu¬ 
nately, the first section of the table, which started 
from Britain, has been mutilated, and we only 
get the Kentish coast. These itineraries were 
specially useful, as the chief journeys of men 
were in the nature of pilgrimages; but these 
often included a sort of commercial travelling, 
pilgrims often combining business and religion 
on their journeys. The chief information about 
Eastern Europe which reached the West was 
given by the succession of pilgrims who visited 
Palestine up to the time of the Crusades. Our 
chief knowledge of the geography of Europe 
during the five centuries between 500 and 1000 
a.d. is given in the reports of successive pil¬ 
grims. 

This period may be regarded as the Dark Age 
of geographical knowledge, during which wild 
conceptions like those contained in the Hereford 
map were substituted for the more accurate 
measurements of the ancients. Curiously enough 
almost down to the time of Columbus the learned 
kept to these conceptions, instead of modifying 
them by the extra knowledge gained during the 
second period of the Middle Ages, when travellers 
of all kinds obtained much fuller information of 
Asia, North Europe, and even, as we shall see, of 
some parts of America. 

It is not altogether surprising that this period 
should have been so backward in geographical 
knowledge, since the map of Europe itself, in its 
political divisions, was entirely readjusted during 
this period. The thousand years of history which 
elapsed between 450 and 1450 were practically 
taken up by successive waves of invasion from 


GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


53 

the centre of Asia, which almost entirely broke 
up the older divisions of the world. 

In the fifth century three wandering tribes 
invaded the Empire, from the banks of the Vis¬ 
tula, the Dnieper, and the Volga respectively. 
The Huns came from the Volga, in the extreme 
east, and under Attila, “ the Hammer of God,” 
wrought consternation in the Empire; the Visi¬ 
goths, from the Dnieper, attacked the Eastern 
Empire; while the Vandals, from the Vistula, 
took a triumphant course through Gaul and Spain, 
and founded for a time a Vandal empire in North 
Africa. One of the consequences of this move¬ 
ment was to drive several of the German tribes 
into France, Italy, and Spain, and even over into 
Britain ; for it is from this stage in the world’s 
history that we can trace the beginning of Eng¬ 
land, properly so called, just as the invasion of 
Gaul by the Franks at this time means the begin¬ 
ning of French history. By the eighth century 
the kingdom of the Franks extended all over 
France, and included most of Central Germany ; 
while on Christmas Day, 800, Charles the Great 
was crowned at Rome, by the Pope, Emperor of 
the Holy Roman Empire, which professed to 
revive the glories of the old empire, but made a 
division between the temporal power held by the 
Emperor and the spiritual power held by the 
Pope. 

One of the divisions of the Frankish Empire 
deserves attention, because upon its fate rested 
the destinies of most of the nations of Western 
Europe. The kingdom of Burgundy, the buffer 
state between France and Germany, has now 
entirely disappeared, except as the name of a 
wine ; but having no natural boundaries, it was 


54 THE story of geographical discovery. 

disputed between France and Germany for a long 
period, and it may be fairly said that the Franco- 
Prussian War was the last stage in its history up 
to the present. A similar state existed in the 
east of Europe, viz. the kingdom of Poland, 
which was equally indefinite in shape, and has 
equally formed a subject of dispute between the 
nations of Eastern Europe. This, as is well 
known, only disappeared as an independent state 
in 1795, when it finally ceased to act as a buffer 
between Russia and the rest of Europe. Roughly 
speaking, after the settlement of the Germanic 
tribes within the confines of the Empire, the 
history of Europe, and therefore its historical 
geography, may be summed up as a struggle for 
the possession of Burgundy and Poland. 

But there was an important interlude in the 
south-west of Europe, which must engage our 
attention as a symptom of a world-historic 
change in the condition of civilisation. During 
the course of the seventh and eighth centuries 
(roughly, between 622 and 750) the inhabitants 
of the Arabian peninsula burst the seclusion 
which they had held since the beginning, almost, 
of history, and, inspired by the zeal of the newly- 
founded religion of Islam, spread their influence 
from India to Spain, along the southern littoral 
of the Mediterranean. When they had once 
settled down, they began to recover the remnants 
of Graeco-Roman science that had been lost on 
the north shores of the Mediterranean. The 
Christians of Syria used Greek for their sacred 
language, and accordingly when the Sultans of 
Bagdad desired to know something of the wisdom 
of the Greeks, they got Syriac-speaking Chris¬ 
tians to translate some of the scientific works of 


GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


55 


the Greeks, first into Syriac, and thence into 
Arabic. In this way they obtained a knowledge 
of the great works of Ptolemy, both in astronomy 
—which they regarded as the more important, 
and therefore the greatest, Almagest—and also 
in geography, though one can easily understand 
the great modifications which the strange names 
of Ptolemy must have undergone in being tran¬ 
scribed first into Syriac and then into Arabic. We 
shall see later on some of the results of the Arabic 
Ptolemy. 

The conquests of the Arabs affected the 
knowledge of geography in a twofold way : by 
bringing about the Crusades, and by renewing 
the acquaintance of the west with the east of 
Asia. The Arabs were acquainted with South- 
Eastern Africa as far south as Zanzibar and So- 
fala, though, following the views of Ptolemy as to 
the Great Unknown South Land, they imagined 
that these spread out into the Indian Ocean to¬ 
wards India. They seem even to have had some 
vague knowledge of the sources of the Nile. 
They were also acquainted with Ceylon, Java, 
and Sumatra, and they were the first people to 
learn the various uses to which the cocoa-nut can 
be put. Their merchants, too, visited China as 
early as the ninth century, and we have from 
their accounts some of the earliest descriptions 
of the Chinese, who were described by them as 
a handsome people, superior in beauty to the 
Indians, with fine dark hair, regular features, and 
very like the Arabs. We shall see later on how 
comparatively easy it was for a Mohammedan to 
travel from one end of the known world to the 
other, owing to the community of religion through¬ 
out such a vast area. 


56 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Some words should perhaps be said on the 
geographical works of the Arabs. One of the 
most important of these, by Yacut, is in the form 
of a huge Gazetteer, arranged in alphabetical 
order; but the greatest geographical work of the 
Arabs is by Edrisi, geographer to King Roger of 
Sicily, 1154, who describes the world somewhat 
after the manner of Ptolemy, but with modifica¬ 
tions of some interest. He divides the world into 
seven horizontal strips, known as “ climates,” and 
ranging from the equator to the British Isles. 
These strips are subdivided into eleven sections, 
so that the world, in Edrisi’s conception, is like a 
chess-board, divided into seventy-seven squares, 
and his work consists of an elaborate description 
of each of these squares taken one by one, each 
climate being worked through regularly, so that 
you might get parts of France in the eighth and 
ninth squares, and other parts in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth. Such a method was not adapted 
to give a clear conception of separate countries, 
but this was scarcely Edrisi’s object. When the 
Arabs—or, indeed, any of the ancient or mediaeval 
writers—wanted to describe a land, they wrote 
about the tribe or nation inhabiting it, and not 
about the position of the towns in it; in other 
words, they drew no marked distinction between 
ethnology and geography. 

But the geography of the Arabs had little 
or no influence upon that of Europe, which, so 
far as maps went, continued to be based on fancy 
instead of fact almost up to the time of Colum¬ 
bus. 

Meanwhile another movement had been going 
on during the eighth and ninth centuries, which 
helped to make Europe what it is, and extended 


GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


57 

considerably the common knowledge of the north¬ 
ern European peoples. For the first time since the 
disappearance of the Phoenicians, a great naval 
power came into existence in Norway, and with¬ 
in a couple of centuries it had influenced almost 



the whole sea-coast of Europe. The Vikings, or 
Sea-Rovers, who kept their long ships in the 
viks y or fjords, of Norway, made vigorous attacks 
all along the coast of Europe, and in several 
cases formed stable governments, and so made, 
in a way, a sort of crust for Europe, preventing 
any further shaking of its human contents. In 
Iceland, in England, in Ireland, in Normandy, in 































58 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Sicily, and at Constantinople (where they formed 
the Varangi, or body-guard of the Emperor), as 
well as in Russia, and for a time in the Holy 
Land, Vikings or Normans founded kingdoms 
between which there was a lively interchange of 
visits and knowledge. 

They certainly extended their voyages to 
Greenland, and there is a good deal of evidence 
:for believing that they travelled from Greenland 
ito Labrador and Newfoundland. In the year 
nooi, an Icelander named Biorn, sailing to Green¬ 
land to visit his father, was driven to the south¬ 
west, and came to a country which they called 
Vinland, inhabited by dwarfs, and having a short¬ 
est day of eight hours, which would correspond 
:roughly to 50° north latitude. The Norsemen 
‘settled there, and as late as 1121 the Bishop of 
Greenland visited them, in order to convert them 
to Christianity. There is little reason to doubt 
that this Vinland was on the mainland of North 
America, and the Norsemen were therefore the 
first Europeans to discover America. As late as 
1380, two Venetians, named Zeno, visited Iceland, 
and reported that there was a tradition there of a 
land named Estotiland, a thousand miles west of 
the Faroe Islands, and south of Greenland. The 
people were reported to be civilised and good 
seamen, though unacquainted with the use of the 
compass, while south of them were savage can¬ 
nibals, and still more to the south-west another 
civilised people, who built large cities and 
temples, but offered up human victims in them. 
There seems to be here a dim knowledge of the 
Mexicans. 

The great difficulty in maritime discovery, 
both for the ancients and the men of the Middle 


GEOGRAPHY IN THE DARK AGES. 


59 


Ages, was the necessity of keeping close to the 
shore. It is true they might guide themselves by 
the sun during the day, and by the pole-star at 
night, but if once the sky was overcast, they 
would become entirely at a loss for their bearings. 
Hence the discovery of the polar tendency of the 
magnetic needle was a necessary prelude to any 
extended voyages away from land. This appears 
<o have been known to the Chinese from quite 
jncient times, and utilised on their junks as early 
as the eleventh century. The Arabs, who 
voyaged to Ceylon and Java, appear to have 
learnt its use from the Chinese, and it is probably 
from them that the mariners of Barcelona first 
introduced its use into Europe. The first mention 
of it is given in a treatise on Natural History by 
Alexander Neckam, foster-brother of Richard, 
Coeur de Lion. Another reference, in a satirical 
poem of the troubadour, Guyot of Provence 
(1190), states that mariners can steer to the north 
star without seeing it, by following the direction 
of a needle floating in a straw in a basin of water, 
after it had been touched by a magnet. But little 
use, however, seems to have been made of this, 
for Brunetto Latini, Dante’s tutor, when on a 
visit to Roger Bacon in 1258, states that the friar 
had shown him the magnet and its properties, but 
adds that, however useful the discovery, “no 
master mariner would dare to use it, lest he 
should be thought to be a magician.” Indeed, 
in the form in which it was first used it would be 
of little practical utility, and it was not till the 
method was found of balancing it on a pivot and 
fixing it on a card, as at present used, that it 
became a necessary part of a sailor’s outfit. This 
practical improvement is attributed to one Fiavio 


60 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Gioja, of Amalfi, in the beginning of the four¬ 
teenth century. 

When once the mariner’s compass had come 
into general use, and its indications observed by 
master mariners in their voyages, a much more 
practical method was at hand for determining the 
relative positions of the different lands. Hitherto- 
geographers (*>., mainly Greeks and Arabs) had 
had to depend for fixing relative positions on the 
vague statements in the itineraries of merchants- 
and soldiers ; but now, with the aid of the com¬ 
pass, it was not difficult to determine the relative 
position of one point to another, while all the 
windings of a road could be fixed down on paper 
without much difficulty. Consequently, while the 
learned monks were content with the mixture of 
myth and fable which we have seen to have 
formed the basis of their maps of the world, the 
seamen of the Mediterranean were gradually 
building up charts of that sea and the neighbour¬ 
ing lands which varied but little from the true 
position. A chart of this kind was called a Portu- 
lano, as giving information of the best routes 
from port to port, and Baron Nordenskiold has 
recently shown how all these portulani are derived 
from a single Catalan map which has been lost, 
but must have been compiled between 1266 and 
1291. And yet there were some of the learned 
who were not above taking instruction from the 
practical knowledge of the seamen. In 1339, one 
Angelico Dulcert, of Majorca, made an elaborate 
map of the world on the principle of the portu- 
lano, giving the coast line—at least of the Medi¬ 
terranean—with remarkable accuracy. A little 
later, in 1375, a Jew of the same island, named 
Cresquez, made an improvement on this by intro- 



The Mediterranean coast in the Portulani. 





















62 the story of geographical discovery. 

during into the eastern parts of the map the 
recently acquired knowledge of Cathay, or China, 
due to the great traveller Marco Polo. His map 
(generally known as the Catalan Map, from the 
language of the inscriptions plentifully scattered 
over it) is divided into eight horizontal strips, 
and on the preceding page will be found a reduced 
reproduction, showing how very accurately the 
coast line of the Mediterranean was reproduced 
in these portulanos. 

With the portulanos, geographical knowledge 
once more came back to the lines of progress, 
by reverting to the representation of fact, and, 
by giving an accurate representation of the 
coast line, enabled mariners to adventure more 
fearlessly and to return more safely, while they 
gave the means of recording any further knowl¬ 
edge. As we shall see, they aided Prince Henry 
the Navigator to start that series of geographi¬ 
cal investigation which led to the discoveries that 
closed the Middle Ages. With them we may fair¬ 
ly close the history of mediaeval geography, so far 
as it professed to be a systematic branch of 
knowledge. 

We must now turn back and briefly sum up 
the additions to knowledge made by travellers, 
pilgrims, and merchants, and recorded in literary 
shape in the form of travels. 

[A uthorities : Lelewel, Gdographie du Moyen Age , 4 vols. 
and atlas, 1852 ; C R. Beazley, Dawn of Geography , 1897, 
and Introduction to Prince Henry the Navigator, 1895 ; Nor- 
denskiold, Periplus , 1897.] 


MEDIEVAL TRAVELS. 


63 


CHAPTER IV. 

MEDIEVAL TRAVELS. 

In the Middle Ages—that is, in the thousand 
years between the eruption of the barbarians 
into the Roman Empire in the fifth century 
and the discovery of the New World in the fif¬ 
teenth—the chief stages of history which affect 
the extension of men’s knowledge of the world 
were: the voyages of the Vikings in the eighth 
and ninth centuries, to which we have already 
referred; the Crusades, in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries; and the growth of the 
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and four¬ 
teenth centuries. The extra knowledge ob¬ 
tained by the Vikings did not penetrate to the 
rest of Europe ; that brought by the Crusades, 
and their predecessors, the many pilgrimages 
to the Holy Land, only restored to Western 
Europe the knowledge already stored up in 
classical antiquity; but the effect of the exten¬ 
sion of the Mongol Empire was of more wide- 
reaching importance, and resulted in the addi¬ 
tion of knowledge about Eastern Asia which was 
not possessed by the Romans, and has only been 
surpassed in modern times during the nineteenth 
century. 

Towards the beginning of the thirteenth cen¬ 
tury, Chinchiz Khan, leader of a small Tatar 
tribe, conquered most of Central and Eastern 
Asia, including China. Under his son, Okkodai, 
these Mongol Tatars turned from China to the 
West, conquered Armenia, and one of the Mon¬ 
gol generals, named Batu, ravaged South Russia 


64 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

and Poland, and captured Buda-Pest, 1241. It 
seemed as if the prophesied end of the world had 
come, and the mighty nations Gog and Magog 
had at last burst forth to fulfil the prophetic 
words. But Okkodai died suddenly, and these 
armies were recalled. Universal terror seized 
Europe, and the Pope, as the head of Christen¬ 
dom, determined to send ambassadors to the 
Great Khan, to ascertain his real intentions. He 
sent a friar named John of Planocarpini, from 
Lyons, in 1245, to the camp of Batu (on the Vol¬ 
ga), who passed him on to the court of the Great 
Khan at Karakorum, the capital of his empire, of 
which only the slightest trace is now left on the 
left bank of the Orkhon, some hundred miles 
south of Lake Baikal. 

Here, for the first time, they heard of a king¬ 
dom on the east coast of Asia which was not 
yet conquered by the Mongols, and which was 
known by the name of Cathay. Fuller infor¬ 
mation was obtained by another friar, named 
William Ruysbroek, or Rubruquis, a Fleming, 
who also visited Karakorum as an ambassador 
from St. Louis, and got back to Europe in 1255, 
and communicated some of his information to 
Roger Bacon. He says : “ These Cathayans are 
little fellows, speaking much through the nose, 
and, as is general with all those Eastern people, 
their eyes are very narrow. . . . The common 
money of Cathay consists of pieces of cotton 
paper, about a palm in length and breadth, upon 
which certain lines are printed, resembling the 
seal of Mangou Khan. They do their writing 
with a pencil such as painters paint with, and a 
single character of theirs comprehends several 
letters, so as to form a whole word." He also 


MEDIEVAL TRAVELS. 


65 

identifies these Cathayans with the Seres of the 
ancients. Ptolemy knew of these as possessing 
the land where the silk comes from, but he had 
also heard of the Sinae, and failed to identify the 
two. It has been conjectured that the name of 
China came to the West by the sea voyage, and 
is a Malay modification, while the names Seres 
and Cathayans came overland, and thus caused 
confusion. 

Other Franciscans followed these, and one of 
them, John of Montecorvino, settled at Khan- 
balig (imperial city), or Pekin, as Archbishop 
(ob. 1358); while Friar Odoric of Pordenone, 
near Friuli, travelled in India and China between 
1316 and 1330, and brought back an account of 
his voyage, filled with the most marvellous men¬ 
dacities, most of which were taken over bodily 
into the work attributed to Sir John Maunde- 
ville. 

The information brought back by these wan¬ 
dering friars fades, however, into insignificance 
before the extensive and accurate knowledge of 
almost the whole of Eastern Asia brought back 
to Europe by Marco Polo, a Venetian, who 
spent eighteen years of his life in the East. His 
travels form an epoch in the history of geographi¬ 
cal discovery only second to the voyages of 
Columbus. 

In 1260 his father and uncle, Nicolo and 
Maffeo Polo, set out from Constantinople on 
a trading venture to the Crimea, after which 
they were led to visit Bokhara, and thence on 
to the court of the Great Khan, Kublai, who 
received them very graciously, and being im¬ 
pressed with the desirability of introducing 
Western civilisation into the new Mongolian 
5 


66 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

empire, he entrusted them with a message to 
the Pope, demanding one hundred wise men of 
the West to teach the Mongolians the Christian 
religion and Western arts. The two brothers 
returned to their native place, Venice, in 1269, 
but found no Pope to comply with the Great 
Khan’s request; for Clement IV. had died the 
year before, and his successor had not yet been 
appointed. They waited about for a couple of 
years till Gregory X. was elected, but he only 
meagrely responded to the Great Khan’s de¬ 
mands, and instructed two Dominicans to accom¬ 
pany the Polos, who on this occasion took with 
them Nicolo’s son, Marco, a lad of seventeen. 
They started in November, 1271, but soon lost 
the company of the Dominicans, who lost heart 
and went back. 

They went first to Ormuz, at the mouth of 
the Persian Gulf, then struck northward through 
Khorasan Balkh to the Oxus, and thence on to 
the Plateau of Pomir. Thence they passed the 
Great Desert of Gobi, and at last reached 
Kublai in May, 1275, at his summer residence 
in Kaipingfu. Notwithstanding that they had 
not carried out his request, the Khan received 
them in a friendly manner, and was especially 
taken by Marco, whom he took into his own 
service; and quite recently a record has been 
found in the Chinese annals, stating that in the 
year 1277 a certain Polo was nominated a Sec¬ 
ond-Class Commissioner of the Privy Council. 
His duty was to travel on various missions to 
Eastern Tibet, to Cochin China, and even to 
India. The Polos amassed much wealth owing 
to the Khan’s favour, but found him very unwill¬ 
ing to let them return to Europe. Marco Polo 


MEDIEVAL TRAVELS. 


67 

held several important posts; for three years he- 
was Governor of the great city of Yanchau, and 
it seemed likely that he would die in the service 
of Kublai Khan. 

But, owing to a fortunate chance, they were 
at last enabled to get back to Europe. The 
Khan of Persia desired to marry a princess of the 
Great Khan’s family, to whom he was related, 
and as the young lady upon whom the choice fell 
could not be expected to undergo the hardships 
of the overland journey from China to Persia, it 
was decided to send her by sea round the coast 
of Asia. The Tatars were not good navigators, 
and the Polos at last obtained permission to 
escort the young princess on the rather perilous 
voyage. They started in 1292, from Zayton, a 
port in Fokien, and after a voyage of over two- 
years round the south coast of Asia, successfully 
carried the lady to her destined home, though she 
ultimately had to marry the son instead of the 
father, who had died in the interim. They took 
leave of her, and travelled through Persia to- 
their own place, which they reached in 1295. 
When they arrived at the ancestral mansion of 
the Polos, in their coarse dress of Tatar cut, their 
relatives for some time refused to believe that 
they were really the long-lost merchants. But 
the Polos invited them to a banquet, in which 
they dressed themselves all in their best, and put 
on new suits for every course, giving the clothes- 
they had taken off to the servants. At the con¬ 
clusion of the banquet they brought forth the 
shabby dresses in which they had first arrived, 
and taking sharp knives, began to rip up the 
seams, from which they took vast quantities of 
rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and/ 


68 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

emeralds, into which form they had converted 
most of their property. This exhibition naturally 
changed the character of the welcome they re¬ 
ceived from their relatives, who were then eager 
to learn how they had come by such riches. 

In describing the wealth of the Great Khan, 
Marco Polo, who was the chief spokesman of the 
party, was obliged to use the numeral “ million ” 
to express the amount of his wealth and the 
number of the population over whom he ruled. 
This was regarded as part of the usual travellers’ 
tales, and Marco Polo was generally known by 
his friends as “ Messer Marco Millione.” 

Such a reception of his stories was no great 
encouragement to ]VIarco to tell the tale of his 
remarkable travels, but in the year of his arrival 
at Venice a war broke out between Genoa and 
the Queen of the Adriatic, in which Marco Polo 
was captured and cast into prison at Genoa. 
There he found as a fellow-prisoner one Rusti- 
cano of Pisa, a man of some learning and a sort 
of predecessor of Sir Thomas Malory, since he 
had devoted much time to re-writing, in prose, 
abstracts of the many romances relating to the 
Round Table. These he wrote, not in Italian 
(which can scarcely be said to have existed for 
literary purposes in those days), but in French, 
the common language of chivalry throughout 
Western Europe. While in prison with Marco 
Polo, he took down in French the narrative of 
the great traveller, and thus preserved it for all 
time. Marco Polo was released in 1299, and 
returned to Venice, where he died some time 
after 9th January, 1334, the date of his will. 

Of the travels thus detailed in Marco Polo’s 
book, and of their importance and significance in 


MEDIEVAL TRAVELS. 


6 9 

the history of geographical discovery, it is impos¬ 
sible to give any adequate account in this place. 
It will, perhaps, suffice if we give the summary of 
his claims made out by Colonel Sir Henry Yule, 
whose edition of his travels is one of the great 
monuments of English learning :— 

“ He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole 
longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after king¬ 
dom which he had seen with his own eyes : the deserts of 
Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, 
the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongolian Steppes, 
cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow 
up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been 
established by Cambaluc: the first traveller to reveal China 
in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, 
its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceiv¬ 
ably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters ; 
to tell us of the nations on its borders, with all their eccentric¬ 
ities of manners and worship ; of Tibet, with its sordid devo¬ 
tees ; of Burma, with its golden pagodas and their tinkling 
crowns ; of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin China, of Japan, the East¬ 
ern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces ; the 
first to speak of that museum of beauty and wonder, still so 
imperfectly ransacked, the Indian Archipelago, source of those 
aromatics then so highly prized, and whose origin was so dark; 
of Java, the pearl of islands ; of Sumatra, with its many kings, 
its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the 
naked savages of Nicobar and Andaman ; of Ceylon, the 
island of gems, with its sacred mountain, and its tomb of 
Adam ; of India the Great, not as a dreamland of Alexandrian 
fables, but as a country seen and personally explored, with its 
virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds, and the 
strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and its 
powerful sun : the first in mediaeval times to give any distinct 
account of the secluded Christian empire of Abyssinia, and 
the semi-Christian island of Socotra ; to speak, though indeed 
dimly, of Zanzibar, with its negroes and its ivory, and of 
the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the dark 
ocean of the South, with its Rue and other monstrosities, 
and, in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic 
Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer-riding Tun- 
guses.” 


70 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Marco Polo’s is thus one of the greatest names 
in the history of geography; it may, indeed, be 
-doubted whether any other traveller has ever 
added so extensively to our detailed knowledge. 



-of the earth’s surface. Certainly up to the time 
of Mr. Stanley no man had on land visited so 
many places previously unknown to civilised 
Europe. But the lands he discovered, though 
-already fully populated, were soon to fall into dis¬ 
order, and to be closed to any civilising influences. 
Nothing for a long time followed from these dis- 




MEDIAEVAL TRAVELS. 


7 r 

coveries, and indeed almost up to the present 
day his accounts were received with incredulity, 
and he himself was regarded more as “ Marco* 
Millione ” than as Marco Polo. 

Extensive as were Marco Polo’s travels, they 
were yet exceeded in extent, though not in 
variety, by those of the greatest of Arabian^ 
travellers, Mohammed Ibn Batuta, a native of 
Tangier, who began his travels in 1334, as part of 
the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan to- 
visit the holy city of Mecca. While at Alexan¬ 
dria he met a learned sage named Borhan Eddin,. 
to whom he expressed his desire to travel. Bor¬ 
han said to him, “ You must then visit my brother 
Farid Iddin and my brother Rokn Eddin in, 
Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in China. 
When you see them, present my compliments to- 
them.” Owing mainly to the fact that the Tatar 
princes had adopted Islamism instead of Chris¬ 
tianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send 
Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was 
ultimately enabled to greet all three brothers of 
Borhan Eddin. Indeed, he performed a more 
extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to con¬ 
vey the greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, 
whom he met in China, to a relative of his resid¬ 
ing in the Soudan. During the thirty years of 
his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia,, 
the Crimea, Constantinople (which he visited in 
company with a Greek princess, who married one 
of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and 
Delhi. Here he found favour with the emperor 
Mohammed Inghlak, who appointed him a judge, 
and sent him on an embassy to China, at first 
overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a. 
route, he went ultimately from Calicut, via Cey- 


72 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Ion, the Maldives, and Sumatra, to Zaitun, then 
the great port of China. Civil war having 
broken out, he returned by the same route to 
Calicut, but dared not face the emperor, and went 
on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned to Tangier 
in 1349. But even then his taste for travel had 
not been exhausted. He soon set out for Spain, 
and worked his way through Morocco, across the 
Sahara, to the Soudan. He travelled along the 
Niger (which he took for the Nile), and visited 
Timbuctoo. He ultimately returned to Fez in 
1 353> twenty-eight years after he had set out on 
his travels. Their chief interest is in showing 
the wide extent of Islam in his day, and the 
facilities which, a common creed gave for exten¬ 
sive travel. But the account of his journeys w r as 
written in Arabic, and had no influence on Euro¬ 
pean knowledge, which, indeed, had little to learn 
from him after Marco Polo, except with regard to 
the Soudan. With him the history of mediaeval 
geography may be fairly said to end, for within 
eighty years of his death began the activity of 
Prince Henry the Navigator, with whom the 
modern epoch begins. 

Meanwhile India had become somewhat better 
known, chiefly by the travels of wandering friars, 
who visited it mainly for the sake of the shrine 
of St. Thomas, who was supposed to have been 
martyred in India. Mention should also be made 
of the early spread of the Nestorian Church 
throughout Central Asia. As early as the seventh 
century the Syrian Christians who followed the 
views of Nestorius began spreading them east¬ 
ward, founding sees in Persia and Turkestan, and 
ultimately spreading as far as Pekin. There was 
a certain revival of their missionary activity 


MEDIAEVAL TRAVELS. 


73 


under the Mongol Khans, but the restricted 
nature of the language in which their reports 
were written prevented them from having any 
effect upon geographical knowledge, except in 
one particular, which is of some interest. The 
fate of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel has always 
excited interest, and a legend arose that they had 
been converted to Christianity, and existed some¬ 
where in the East under a king who was also a 
priest, and known as Prester John. Now, in the 
reports brought by some of the Nestorian priests 
westward, it was stated that one of the Mongol 
princes named Ung Khan had adopted Christian¬ 
ity, and as this in Syriac sounded something like 
“ John the Cohen,” or “ Priest,” he was identified 
with the Prester John of legend, and for a long 
time one of the objects of travel in the East was 
to discover this Christian kingdom. It was, how¬ 
ever, later ascertained that there did exist such 
a Christian kingdom in Abyssinia, and as, owing 
to the erroneous views of Ptolemy, followed by 
the Arabs, Abyssinia was considered to spread 
towards Farther India, the land of Prester John 
was identified in Abyssinia. We shall see later on 
how this error helped the progress of geographical 
discovery. 

The total addition of these mediaeval travels 
to geographical knowledge consisted mainly in 
the addition of a wider extent of land in China, 
and the archipelago of Japan, or Cipangu, to the 
map of the world. The accompanying map dis¬ 
plays the various travels and voyages of impor¬ 
tance, and will enable the reader to understand 
how students of geography, who added on to 
Ptolemy’s estimate of the extent of the world 
east and west the new knowledge acquired by 


74 THE story of geographical discovery. 

Marco Polo, would still further decrease the dis¬ 
tance westward between Europe and Cipangu, 
•and thus prepare men for the voyage of Co¬ 
lumbus. 

[Authorities : Sir Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither , 
1865 ; The Book of Ser Marco Polo , 1875.] 


CHAPTER V. 

ROADS AND COMMERCE. 

We have now conducted the course of our 
inquiries through ancient times and the Middle 
Ages up to the very eve of the great discoveries 
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and we 
have roughly indicated what men had learned 
.about the earth during that long period, and how 
they learned it. But it still remains to consider 
by what means they arrived at their knowledge, 
and why they sought for it. To some extent we 
may have answered the latter question when deal¬ 
ing with the progress of conquest, but men did 
not conquer merely for the sake of conquest. 
We have still to consider the material advantages 
attaching to warfare. Again, when men go on 
their wars of discovery, they have to progress, 
for the most part, along paths already beaten for 
them by the natives of the country they intend 
to conquer ; and often when they have succeeded 
in warfare, they have to consolidate their rule by 
•creating new and more appropriate means of com¬ 
munication. To put it shortly, we have still to 
discuss the roads of the ancient and mediaeval 


ROADS AND COMMERCE. 


75 

worlds, and the commerce for which those roads 
were mainly used. 

A road may be, for our purposes, most readily 
defined as the most convenient means of commu¬ 
nication between two towns; and this logically 
implies that the towns existed before the roads 
were made; and in a fuller investigation of any 
particular roads, it will be necessary to start by 
investigating why men collect their dwellings at 
certain definite spots. In the beginning, as¬ 
semblies of men were made chiefly or altogether 
for defensive purposes, and the earliest towns 
were those which, from their natural position, 
like Athens or Jerusalem, could be most easily 
defended. Then, again, religious motives often 
had their influence in early times, and towns 
would grow round temples or cloisters. But soon 
considerations of easy accessibility rule in the 
choice of settlements, and for that purpose towns 
on rivers, especially at fords of rivers, as West¬ 
minster, or in well-protected harbours like 
Naples, or in the centre of a district, as Nurem¬ 
berg or Vienna, would form the most convenient 
places of meeting for exchange of goods. Both 
on a river, or on the sea-shore, the best means of 
communication would be by ships or boats; but 
once such towns had been established, it would be 
necessary to connect them with one another by 
land routes, and these would be determined 
chiefly by the lay of the land. Where mountains 
interfered, a large detour would have to be made 
—as, for example, round the Pyrenees; if rivers 
intervened, fords would have to be sought for, 
and a new town probably built at the most con¬ 
venient place of passage. When once a recog¬ 
nised way had been found between any two 


76 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

places, the conservative instincts of man would 
keep it in existence, even though a better route 
were afterwards found. 

The influence of water communication is of 
paramount importance in determining the situa¬ 
tion of towns in early times. Towns in the cor¬ 
ners of bays, like Archangel, Riga, Venice, Genoa, 
Naples, Tunis, Bassorah, Calcutta, would natu¬ 
rally be the centre-points of the trade of the bay. 
On rivers a suitable spot would be where the 
tides ended, like London, or at conspicuous bends 
of a stream, or at junctures with affluents, as 
Coblentz or Khartoum. One nearly always finds 
important towns at the two ends of a peninsula, 
like Hamburg and Lubeck, Venice and Genoa; 
though for naval purposes it is desirable to have 
a station at the head of the peninsula, to com¬ 
mand both arms of the sea, as at Cherbourg, Se¬ 
vastopol, or Gibraltar. Roads would then easily 
be formed across the base of the peninsula, and 
to its extreme point. 

At first the inhabitants of any single town 
would regard those of all others as their enemies, 
but after a time they would find it convenient to 
exchange some of their superfluities for those of 
their neighbours, and in this way trade would begin. 
Markets would become neutral ground, in which 
mutual animosities would be, for a time, laid 
aside for the common advantage ; and it would 
often happen that localities on the border line of 
two states would be chosen as places for the ex¬ 
change of goods, ultimately giving rise to the 
existence of a fresh town. As commercial inter¬ 
course increased, the very inaccessibility of fort¬ 
ress towns on the heights would cause them to be 
neglected for settlements in the valleys or by the 


ROADS AND COMMERCE. 


77 


river sides, and, as a rule, roads pick out valleys 
or level ground for their natural course. For 
military purposes, however, it would sometimes 
be necessary to depart from the valley routes, and, 
as we shall see, the Roman roads paid no regard 
to these requirements. 

The earliest communication between nations, 
as we have seen, was that of the Phoenicians by 
sea. They founded factories, or neutral grounds 
for trade, at appropriate spots all along the 
Mediterranean coasts, and the Greeks soon fol¬ 
lowed their example in the Higean and Black 
Seas. But at an early date, as we know from the 
Bible, caravan routes were established between 
Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and later on 
these were extended into Farther Asia. But in 
Europe the great road-builders were the Romans. 
Rome owed its importance in the ancient world 
to its central position, at first in Italy, and then 
in the whole of the Mediterranean. It combined 
almost all the advantages necessary for a town : 
it was in the bend of a river, yet accessible from 
the sea; its natural hills made it easily defens¬ 
ible, as Hannibal found to his cost; while its 
central position in the Latian Plain made it the 
natural resort of all the Latin traders. The 
Romans soon found it necessary to utilise their 
central position by rendering themselves acces¬ 
sible to the rest of Italy, and they commenced 
building those marvellous roads, which in most 
cases have remained, owing to their solid con¬ 
struction. “ Building ” is the proper word to use, 
for a Roman road is really a broad wall built in 
a deep ditch so as to come up above the level of 
the surface. Scarcely any amount of traffic could 
wear this solid substructure away, and to this day 


78 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

throughout Europe traces can be found of the 
Roman roads built nearly two thousand years 
ago. As the Roman Empire extended, these 
roads formed one of the chief means by which 
the lords of the world were enabled to preserve 
their conquests. By placing a legion in a central 
spot, where many of these roads converged, they 
were enabled to strike quickly in any direction 
and overawe the country. Stations were natu¬ 
rally built along these roads, and to the present 
day many of the chief highways of Europe follow 
the course of the old Roman roads. Our modern 
civilisation is in a large measure the outcome of 
this network of roads, and we can distinctly trace 
a difference in the culture of a nation where such 
roads never existed—as in Russia and Hungary, 
as contrasted with the west of Europe, where 
they formed the best means of communication. 
It was only in the neighbourhood of these high¬ 
ways that the fullest information was obtained of 
the position of towns, and the divisions of 
peoples; and a sketch map, like the one already 
given, of the chief Roman roads of antiquity, 
gives also, as it were, a skeleton of the geograph¬ 
ical knowledge summed up in the great work of 
Ptolemy. 

But of more importance for the future devel¬ 
opment of geographical knowledge were the great 
caravan routes of Asia, to which we must now 
turn our attention. Asia is the continent of 
plateaux which culminate in the Steppes of the 
Pamirs, appropriately called by their inhabitants 
“the Roof of the World.” To the east of these, 
four great mountain ranges run, roughly, along 
the parallels of latitude—the Himalayas to the 
south, the Kuen-lun, Thian Shan, and Altai to the 


ROADS AND COMMERCE. 


79 


north. Between the Himalayas and the Kuen-lun 
is the great Plateau of Tibet, which runs into a 
sort of cul-de-sac at its western end in Kashmir. 
Between the Kuen-lun and the Thian Shan we 
have the Gobi Steppe of Mongolia, running west 
of Kashgar and Yarkand; while between the 
Thian Shan and the Altai we have the great Kir¬ 
ghiz Steppe. It is clear that only two routes are 
possible between Eastern and Western Asia: 
that between the Kuen-lun and the Thian-Shan 
via Kashgar and Bokhara, and that south of 
the Altai, skirting the north of the great lakes 
Balkash, Aral, and Caspian, to the south of 
Russia. The former would lead to Bassorah or 
Ormuz, and thence by sea, or overland, round 
Arabia to Alexandria; the latter and longer 
route would reach Europe via Constantinople. 
Communication between Southern Asia and 
Europe would mainly be by sea, along the coast 
of the Indies, taking advantage of the monsoons 
from Ceylon to Aden, and then by the Red Sea. 
Alexandria, Bassorah, and Ormuz would thus 
naturally be the chief centres of Eastern trade, 
while communication with the Mongols or with 
China would go along the two routes above men¬ 
tioned, which appear to have existed during all 
historic time. It was by these latter routes that 
the Polos and the other mediaeval travellers to 
Cathay reached that far-distant country. But, as 
we know from Marco Polo’s travels, China could 
also be reached by the sea voyage ; and for all 
practical purposes, in the late Middle Ages, when 
the Mongol empire broke up, and traffic through 
mid Asia was not secure, communication with the 
East was via Alexandria. 

Now it is important for our present inquiry to 


So THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

realise how largely Europe after the Crusades 
was dependent on the East for most of the lux¬ 
uries of life. Nothing produced by the looms of 
Europe could equal the silk of China, the calico of 
India, the muslin of Mussul. The chief gems 
which decorated the crowns of kings and nobles, 
the emerald, the topaz, the ruby, the diamond, all 
came from the East—mainly from India. The 
whole of mediaeval medical science was derived 
from the Arabs, who sought most of their drugs 
from Arabia or India. Even for the incense which 
burned upon the innumerable altars of Roman 
Catholic Europe, merchants had to seek the 
materials in the Levant. For many of the more 
refined handicrafts, artists had to seek their best 
material from Eastern traders: such as shellac 
for varnish, or mastic for artists’ colours (gam¬ 
boge from Cambodia, ultramarine from lapis 
lazuli); while it was often necessary, under medi¬ 
aeval circumstances, to have resort to the musk or 
opopanax of the East to counteract the odours 
resulting from the bad sanitary habits of the 
West. But above all, for the condiments which 
were almost necessary for health, and certainly 
desirable for seasoning the salted food of winter 
and the salted fish of Lent, Europeans were 
dependent upon the spices of the Asiatic islands. 
In Hakluyt’s great work on “English Voyages 
and Navigations,” he gives in his second volume 
a list, written out by an Aleppo merchant, William 
Barrett, in 1584, of the places whence the chief 
staples of the eastern trade came, and it will be 
interesting to give a selection from his long 
account. 


ROADS AND COMMERCE. 


8l 


Cloves from Maluco, Tarenate, Amboyna, by way of 
Java. 

Nutmegs from Banda. 

Maces from Banda, Java, and Malacca. 

Pepper Common from Malabar. 

Sinnamon from Sedan (Ceylon). 

Spicknard from Zindi (Scinde) and Lahor. 

Ginger Sorattin from Sorat (Surat) within Cambaia (Bay 
of Bengal). 

Corall of Levant from Malabar. 

Sal Ammoniacke from Zindi and Cambaia. 

Camphora from Brimeo (Borneo) near to China. 

Myrrha from Arabia Felix. 

Borazo (Borax) from Cambaia and Lahor. 

Ruvia to die withall, from Chalangi. 

Allumme di Rocca (Rock Alum) from China and Con¬ 
stantinople. 

Oppopanax from Persia. 

Lignum Aloes from Cochin, China, and Malacca. „ 
Laccha (Shell-lac) from Pegu and Balaguate. 

Agaricum from Alemannia. 

Bdellium from Arabia Felix. 

Tamarinda from Balsara (Bassorah). 

Safran (Saffron) from Balsara and Persia. 

Thus from Secutra (Socotra). 

Nux Vomica from Malabar. 

Sanguis Draconis (Dragon’s Blood) from Secutra. 

Musk from Tartarie by way of China. 

Indico (Indigo) from Zindi and Cambaia. 

Silkes Fine from China. 

Castorium (Castor Oil) from Almania. 

Masticke from Sio. 

Oppium from Pugia (Pegu) and Cambaia. 

Dates from Arabia Felix and Alexandria. 

Sena from Mecca. 

Gumme Arabicke from Zaffo (Jaffa). 

Ladanum (Laudanum) from Cyprus and Candia. 

Lapis Lazzudis from Persia. 

Auripigmentum (Gold Paint) from many places of Turkey. 
Rubarbe from Persia and China. 


These are only a few selections from Barrett’s 
list, but will sufficiently indicate what a large 


82 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

number of household luxuries, and even necessities, 
were derived from Asia in the Middle Ages. The 
Arabs had practically the monopoly of this trade, 
and as Europe had scarcely anything to offer in 
exchange except its gold and silver coins, there 
was a continuous drain of the precious metals 
from West to East, rendering the Sultans and 
Caliphs continuously richer, and culminating in 
the splendours of Solomon the Magnificent. 
Alexandria was practically the centre of all this 
trade, and most of the nations of Europe found 
it necessary to establish factories in that city, to 
safeguard the interests of their merchants, who 
all sought for eastern luxuries in its port. Ben¬ 
jamin of Tudela, a Jew, who visited it about 1172, 
gives the following description of it:— 

“ The city is very mercantile, and affords an excellent 
market to all nations. People from all Christian kingdoms 
resort to Alexandria, from Valencia, Tuscany, Lombardy, 
Apulia, Amalfi, Sicilia, Raguvia, Catalonia, Spain, Rous¬ 
sillon, Germany, Saxony, Denmark, England, Flandres, 
Hainault, Normandy, France, Poitou, Anjou, Burgundy, 
Mediana, Provence, Genoa, Pisa, Gascony, Arragon, and 
Navarre. From the West you meet Mohammedans from 
Andalusia, Algarve, Africa, and Arabia, as well as from the 
countries towards India, Savila, Abyssinia, Nubia, Yemen, 
Mesopotamia, and Syria, besides Greeks and Turks. From 
India they import all sorts of spices, which are bought by 
Christian merchants. The city is full of bustle, and every 
nation has its own fonteccho (or hostelry) there.” 

Of all these nations, the Italians had the 
shortest voyage to make before reaching Alex¬ 
andria, and the Eastern trade practically fell 
into their hands before the end of the thirteenth 
century. At first Amalfi and Pisa were the chief 
ports, and, as we have seen, it was at Amalfi that 
the mariner’s compass was perfected; but soon 


ROADS AND COMMERCE. 8$ 

the two maritime towns at the heads of the two 
seas surrounding Italy came to the front, owing 
to the advantages of their natural position. 
Genoa and Venice for a long time competed with 
one another for the monopoly of this trade, but 
the voyage from Venice was more direct, and 
after a time Genoa had to content itself with the 
trade with Constantinople and the northern over¬ 
land route from China. From Venice the spices,, 
the jewels, the perfumes, and stuffs of the East 
were transmitted north through Augsburg and 
Niirnberg to Antwerp and Bruges and the Hanse 
Towns, receiving from them the gold they had 
gained by their fisheries and textile goods. Eng¬ 
land sent her wool to Italy, in order to tickle her 
palate and her nose with the condiments and per¬ 
fumes of the East. 

The wealth and importance of Venice were 
due almost entirely to this monopoly of the lucra¬ 
tive Eastern trade. By the fifteenth century she 
had extended her dominions all along the lower 
valley of the Po, into Dalmatia, parts of the 
Morea, and in Crete, till at last, in 1489, she ob¬ 
tained possession of Cyprus, and thus had sta¬ 
tions all the way from Aleppo or Alexandria to 
the north of the Adriatic. But just as she 
seemed to have reached the height of her pros¬ 
perity—when the Aldi were the chief printers in 
Europe, and the Bellini were starting the great 
Venetian school of painting—a formidable rival 
came to the front, who had been slowly preparing: 
a novel method of competition in the Eastern 
trade for nearly the whole of the fifteenth cen¬ 
tury. With that method begins the great epoch 
of modern geographical discovery. 

[.Authorities : Heyd, Commerce du Levant, 2 vols., 1878.] 


84 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 


CHAPTER VI. 

TO THE INDIES EASTWARD-PRINCE HENRY 

AND VASCO DA GAMA. 

Up to the fifteenth century the inhabitants 
of the Iberian Peninsula were chiefly occupied 
in slowly moving back the tide of Mohammedan 
conquest, which had spread nearly throughout 
the country from 711 onwards. The last sigh of 
the Moor in Spain was to be uttered in 1492—an 
epoch-making year, both in history and in geog¬ 
raphy. But Portugal, the western side of the 
peninsula, had got rid of her Moors at a much 
earlier date—more than 200 years before— 
though she found it difficult to preserve her 
independence from the neighbouring kingdom 
of Castile. The attempt of King Juan of Cas¬ 
tile to conquer the country was repelled by Joao, 
a natural son of the preceding king of Portugal, 
and in 1385 he became king, and freed Portugal 
from any danger on the side of Castile by his 
victory at Aljubarrota. He married Philippa, 
daughter of John of Gaunt; and his third son, 
Henry, was destined to be the means of revolu¬ 
tionising men’s views of the inhabited globe. He 
first showed his mettle in the capture of Ceuta, 
opposite Gibraltar, at the time of the battle of 
Agincourt, 1415, and by this means he first 
planted the Portuguese banner on the Moorish 
coast. This contact with the Moors may possibly 
have first suggested to Prince Henry the idea of 
planting similar factory-fortresses among the 
Mussulmans of India ; but, whatever the cause, 
he began, from about the year 1418, to devote all 


TO THE INDIES EASTWARD. 85 

his thoughts and attention to the possibility of 
reaching India otherwise than through the known 
routes, and for that purpose established himself 
on the rocky promontory of Sagres, almost the 
most western spot on the continent of Europe. 

Here he established an observatory, and a sem¬ 
inary for the training of theoretical and practical 
navigators. He summoned thither astronomers 
and cartographers and skilled seamen, while he 
caused stouter and larger vessels to be built for 
the express purpose of exploration. He perfected 
the astrolabe (the clumsy predecessor of the mod¬ 
ern sextant) by which the latitude could be with 
some accuracy determined; and he equipped all 
his ships with the compass, by which the steer¬ 
ing was entirely determined. He brought from 
Majorca (which, as we have seen, was the centre 
of practical map-making in the fourteenth cen¬ 
tury) one Mestre Jacme, “a man very skilful in 
the art of navigation, and in the making of maps 
and instruments.” With his aid, and doubtless 
that of others, he set himself to study the prob¬ 
lem of the possibility of a sea voyage to India 
round the coast of Africa. 

We have seen that Ptolemy, with true scien¬ 
tific caution, had left undefined the extent of 
Africa to the south ; but Eratosthenes and many 
of the Roman geographers, even after Ptolemy, 
were not content with this agnosticism, but 
boldly assumed that the coast of Africa made a 
semicircular sweep from the right horn of Africa, 
just south of the Red Sea, with which they were 
acquainted, round to the north-western shore, 
near what we now term Morocco. If this were 
the fact, the voyage by the ocean along this 
sweep of shore would be even shorter than the 


86 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

voyage through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, 
while of course there would be no need for dis¬ 
embarking at the Isthmus of Suez. The writers 
who thus curtailed Africa of its true proportions 
assumed another continent south of it, which, 
however, was in the torrid zone, and completely 
uninhabitable. 

Now the north-west coast of Africa was 
known in Prince Henry’s days as far as Cape 
Bojador. It would appear that Norman sailors 
had already advanced beyond Cape Non, or Nun, 
which was so called because it was supposed that 
nothing existed beyond it. Consequently the 
problems that Prince Henry had to solve were 
whether the coast of Africa trended sharply to 
the east after Cape Bojador, and whether the 
ideas of the ancients about the uninhabitability 
of the torrid zone were justified by fact. He at¬ 
tempted to solve these problems by sending out, 
year after year, expeditions down the north-west 
•coast of Africa, each of which penetrated farther 
than its predecessor. Almost at the beginning 
he was rewarded by the discovery, or rediscov¬ 
ery, of Madeira, in 1420, by Joao Gonsalvez 
Zarco, one of the squires of his household. For 
some time he was content with occupying this 
and the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, which, 
however, was ruined by the rabbits let loose 
upon it. On Madeira vines from Burgundy were 
planted, and to this day form the chief industry 
of the island. In 1435 Cape Bojador was passed, 
and in 1441 Cape Branco discovered. Two years 
later Cape Verde was reached and passed by 
Nuno Tristao, and for the first time there were 
signs that the African coast trended eastward. 
By this time Prince Henry’s men had become 


















88 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

familiar with the natives along the shore, and no 
less than one thousand of them had been brought 
back and distributed among the Portuguese no¬ 
bles as pages and attendants. In 1455 a Vene¬ 
tian, named Alvez Cadamosto, undertook a voy¬ 
age still farther south for purposes of trade, the 
Prince supplying the capital, and covenanting for 
half profits on results. They reached the mouth 
of the Gambia, but found the natives hostile. 
Here for the first time European navigators lost 
sight of the pole-star and saw the brilliant con¬ 
stellation of the Southern Cross. The last dis¬ 
covery made during Prince Henry’s life was that 
of the Cape Verde Islands, by one of his captains, 
Diogo Gomez, in 1460—the very year of his 
death. As the successive discoveries were made, 
they were jotted down by the Prince’s carto¬ 
graphers on portulanos, and just before his death 
the King of Portugal sent to a Venetian monk, 
Fra Mauro, details of all discoveries up to that 
time, to be recorded on a mappa mundi , a copy of 
which still exists (p. 70). 

The impulse thus given by Prince Henry’s 
patient investigation of the African coast con¬ 
tinued long after his death. In 1471 Fernando 
de Poo discovered the island which now bears 
his name, while in the same year Pedro d’Escobar 
crossed the equator. Wherever the Portuguese 
investigators landed they left marks of their 
presence, at first by erecting crosses, then by 
carving on trees Prince Henry’s motto, “ Talent 
de bien faire,” and finally they adopted the 
method of erecting stone pillars, surmounted by 
a cross, and inscribed with the king’s arms and 
name. These pillars were called padraos. In 
1484, Diego Cam, a knight of the king’s house- 


TO THE INDIES EASTWARD. 89 

hold, set up one of these pillars at the mouth of 
a large river, which he therefore called the Rio 
do Padrao; it was called by the natives the 
Zaire, and is now known as the River Congo. 
Diego Cam was, on this expedition, accompanied 
by Martin Behaim of Niirnberg, whose globe is 
celebrated in geographical history as the last 
record of the older views (p. 104). 

Meanwhile, from one of the envoys of the 
native kings who visited the Portuguese Court, 
information was received that far to the east of 
the countries hitherto discovered there was a 
great Christian king. This brought to mind the 
mediaeval tradition of Prester John, and accord¬ 
ingly the Portuguese determined to make a 
double attempt, both by sea and by land, to 
reach this monarch. By sea the king sent two 
vessels under the command of Bartholomew 
Diaz, while by land he despatched, in the fol¬ 
lowing year, two men acquainted with Arabic, 
Pedro di Covilham and Affonso de Payba. Covil- 
ham reached Aden, and there took ship for Cali¬ 
cut, being the first Portuguese to sail the Indian 
Ocean. He then returned to Sofala, and ob¬ 
tained news of the Island of the Moon, now 
known as Madagascar. With this information he 
returned to Cairo, where he found ambassadors 
from Joao, two Jews, Abraham of Beja and Jo¬ 
seph of Lamejo. These he sent back with the 
information that ships that sailed down the coast 
of Guinea would surely reach the end of Africa, 
and when they arrived in the Eastern Ocean they 
should ask for Sofala and the Island of the Moon. 
Meanwhile Covilham returned to the Red Sea, 
and made his way into Abyssinia, where he mar¬ 
ried and settled down, transmitting from time to 


90 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

time information to Portugal which gave Euro¬ 
peans their first notions of Abyssinia. 

The voyage by land in search of Prester John 
had thus been completely successful, while, at 
the same time, information had been obtained 
giving certain hopes of the voyage by sea. This 
had, in its way, been almost as successful, for 
Diaz had rounded the cape now known as the 
Cape of Good Hope, but to which he proposed 
giving the title of Cabo Tormentoso, or “Stormy 
Cape.” King Joao, however, recognising that Diaz’s 
voyage had put the seal upon the expectations 
with which Prince Henry had, seventy years be¬ 
fore, started his series of explorations, gave it the 
more auspicious name by which it is now known. 

For some reason which has not been ade¬ 
quately explained, no further attempt was made 
for nearly ten years to carry out the final con¬ 
summation of Prince Henry’s plan by sending 
out another expedition. In the meantime, as we 
shall see, Columbus had left Portugal, after a 
mean attempt had been made by the king to 
carry out his novel plan of reaching India with¬ 
out his aid; and, as a just result, the discovery 
of a western voyage to the Indies (as it was then 
thought) had been successfully accomplished by 
Columbus, in the service of the Catholic mon- 
archs of Spain, in 1492. This would naturally 
give pause to any attempt at reaching India by 
the more cumbersome route of coasting along 
Africa, which had turned out to be a longer 
process than Prince Henry had thought. Three 
years after Columbus’s discovery King Joao 
died, and his son and successor Emmanuel did 
not take up the traditional Portuguese method of 
reaching India till the third year of his reign. 


TO THE INDIES EASTWARD. 


9 1 


By this time it had become clear, from Colum¬ 
bus’s second voyage, that there were more diffi¬ 
culties in the way of reaching the Indies by his 
method than had been thought; and the year 
after his return from his second voyage in 1496, 
King Emmanuel determined on once more tak¬ 
ing up the older method. He commissioned 
Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of his court, to 
attempt the eastward route to India with three 
vessels, carrying in all about sixty men. Already 
by this time Columbus’s bold venture into the un¬ 
known seas had encouraged similar boldness in 
others, and instead of coasting down the whole 
extent of the western coast of Africa, Da Gama 
steered direct for Cape Verde Islands, and thence 
out into the ocean, till he reached the Bay of St. 
Helena, a little to the north of the Cape of Good 
Hope. 

For a time he was baffled in his attempt to 
round the Cape by the strong south-easterly 
winds, which blow there continually during 
the summer season ; but at last he commenced 
coasting along the eastern shores of Africa, and 
at every suitable spot he landed some of his 
sailors to make inquiries about Covilham and 
the court of Prester John. But in every case he 
found the ports inhabited by fanatical Moors, 
who, as soon as they discovered that their visi¬ 
tors were Christians, attempted to destroy them, 
and refused to supply them with pilots for the 
further voyage to India. This happened at 
Mozambique, at Quiloa, and at Mombasa, and 
it was not till he arrived at Melinda that he was 
enabled to obtain provisions and a pilot, Malemo 
Cana, an Indian of Guzerat, who was quite 
familiar with the voyage to Calicut. Under his 


92 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

guidance Gama’s fleet went from Melinda to Cali¬ 
cut in twenty-three days. Here the Zamorin, or 
sea-king, displayed the same antipathy to his 
Christian visitors. The Mohammedan traders of 
the place recognised at once the dangerous rivalry 
which the visit of the Portuguese implied with 
their monopoly of the Eastern trade, and repre¬ 
sented Gama and his followers as merely pirates. 
Vasco, however, by his firm behaviour, managed 
to evade the machinations of his trade rivals, and 
induced the Zamorin to regard favourably an 
alliance with the Portuguese king. Contenting 
himself with this result, he embarked again, and 
after visiting Melinda, the only friendly spot he 
had found on the east coast of Africa, he re¬ 
turned to Lisbon in September, 1499, having 
spent no less than two years on the voyage. 
King Emmanuel received him with great favour, 
and appointed him Admiral of the Indies. 

The significance of Vasco da Gama’s voyage 
was at once seen by the persons whose trade 
monopoly it threatened—the Venetians, and the 
Sultan of Egypt. Priuli, the Venetian chronicler, 
reports: “When this news reached Venice the 
whole city felt it greatly, and remained stupefied, 
and the wisest held it as the worst news that had 
ever arrived ”—as indeed they might, for it 
prophesied the downfall of the Venetian Empire. 
The Sultan of Egypt was equally moved, for the 
greatest source of his riches was derived from the 
duty of five per cent, which he levied on all mer¬ 
chandise entering his dominions, and ten per 
cent, upon all goods exported from them. Hith¬ 
erto there had been all manner of bickerings 
between Venice and Egypt, but this common 
danger brought them together. The Sultan 


TO THE INDIES EASTWARD. 


93 


represented to Venice the need of common ac¬ 
tion in order to drive away the new commerce; 
but Egypt was without a navy, and had indeed 
no wood suitable for ship-building. The Vene¬ 
tians took the trouble to transmit wood to Cairo, 
which was then carried by camels to Suez, where 
a small fleet was prepared to attack the Portu¬ 
guese on their next visit to the Indian Ocean. 

The Portuguese had in the meantime followed 
up Vasco da Gama’s voyage with another at¬ 
tempt, which was, in its way, even more impor¬ 
tant. In 1500 the king sent no less than thirteen 
ships under the command of Pedro Alvarez 
Cabral, with Franciscans to convert, and twelve 
hundred fighting men to overawe, the Moslems of 
the Indian Ocean. He determined on steering 
even a more westerly course than Vasco da Gama, 
and when he arrived in 17 0 south of the line, he 
discovered land which he took possession of in 
the name of Portugal, and named Santa Cruz. 
The actual cross which he erected on this occa¬ 
sion is still preserved in Brazil, for Cabral had 
touched upon the land now known by that name. 
It is true that one of Columbus’s companions, 
Pinzon, had already touched upon the coast of 
Brazil before Cabral, but it is evident from his 
experience that, even apart from Columbus, the 
Portuguese would have discovered the New World 
sooner or later. It is, however, to be observed 
that in stating this, as all historians do, they leave 
out of account the fact that, but for Columbus, 
sailors would still have continued the old course 
of coasting along the shore, by which they would 
never have left the Old World. Cabral lost sev¬ 
eral of his ships and many of his men, and, though 
he brought home a rich cargo, was not regarded 


94 THE story of geographical discovery/ 

as successful, and Vasco da Gama was again sent 
out with a large fleet in 1502, with which he con¬ 
quered the Zamorin of Calicut and obtained rich 
treasures. In subsidiary voyages the Portuguese 
navigators discovered the islands of St. Helena, 
Ascension, the Seychelles, Socotra, Tristan da 
Cunha, the Maldives, and Madagascar. 

Meanwhile King Emmanuel was adopting the 
Venetian method of colonisation, which consisted 
in sending a Vice-Doge to each of its colonies for 
a term of two years, during which his duty was 
to encourage trade and to collect tribute. In a 
similar way, Emmanuel appointed a Viceroy for 
his Eastern trade, and in 1505 Almeida had 
settled in Ceylon, with a view to monopolising 
the cinnamon trade of that place. 

But the greatest of the Portuguese viceroys 
was Affonso de Albuquerque, who captured the 
important post of Goa, on the mainland of India, 
which still belongs to Portugal, and the port of 
Ormuz, which, we have seen, was one of the 
centres of the Eastern trade. Even more impor¬ 
tant was the capture of the Moluccas, or Spice 
Islands, which were discovered in 1511, after the 
Portuguese had seized Malacca. By 1521 the 
Portuguese had full possession of the Spice 
Islands, and thus held the trade of condiments 
entirely in their own hands. The result was seen 
soon in the rise of prices in the European mar¬ 
kets. Whereas at the end of the fifteenth century 
pepper, for instance, was about 17s. a pound, 
from 1521 and onwards its average price grew to 
be 25s., and so with almost all the ingredients by 
which food could be made more tasty. One of 
the circumstances, however, which threw the mon¬ 
opoly into the hands of the Portuguese was the 


PORTUGUESE INDIES _ 

80 IOO 120 140 



140 

























96 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

seizure of Egypt in 1521 by the Turks under 
Selim I., which would naturally derange the course 
of trade from its old route through Alexandria. 
From the Moluccas easy access was found to 
China, and ultimately to Japan, so that the Portu¬ 
guese fora time held in their hands the whole of 
the Eastern trade, on which Europe depended for 
most of its luxuries. 

As we shall see, the Portuguese only won by 
a neck—if we may use a sporting expression—in 
the race for the possession of the Spice Islands. 
In the very year they obtained possession of 
them, Magellan, on his way round the world, had 
reached the Philippines, within a few hundred 
miles of them, and his ship, the Victoria, actually 
sailed through them that year. In fact, 1521 is a 
critical year in the discovery of the world, for 
both the Spanish and Portuguese (the two nations 
who had attempted to reach the Indies eastward 
and westward) arrived at the goal of their desires, 
the Spice Islands, in that same year, while the 
closure of Egypt to commerce occurred-oppor¬ 
tunely to divert the trade into the hands of the 
Portuguese. Finally, the year 1521 was signal¬ 
ised by the death of King Emmanuel of Portugal, 
under whose auspices the work of Prince Henry 
the Navigator was completed. 

It must here be observed that we are again 
anticipating matters. As soon as the discovery 
of the New World was announced, the Pope was 
appealed to, to determine the relative shares of 
Spain and Portugal in the discoveries which 
would clearly follow upon Columbus’s voyage. 
By his Bull, dated 4th May, 1493, Alexander VI. 
granted all discoveries to the west to Spain, leav¬ 
ing it to be understood that all to the east belonged 


TO THE INDIES EASTWARD. 


97 


to Portugal. The line of demarcation was an 
imaginary one drawn from, pole to pole, and pass¬ 
ing one hundred leagues west of the Azores and 
Cape Verde Islands, which were supposed, in the 
inaccurate geography of the time, to be in the 
same meridian. In the following year the Portu¬ 
guese monarch applied for a revision of the raya, 
as this would keep him out of all discovered in 
the New World altogether ; and the line of de¬ 
marcation was then shifted 270 leagues westward, 
or altogether mo miles west of the Cape Verdes. 
By a curious coincidence, within six years Cabral 
had discovered Brazil, which fell within the angle 
thus cut off by the raya from South America. Or 
was it entirely a coincidence ? May not Cabral 
have been directed to take this unusually west¬ 
ward course in order to ascertain if any land fell 
within the Portuguese claims ? When, however, 
the Spice Islands were discovered, it remained to 
be discussed whether the line of demarcation, 
when continued on the other side of the globe, 
brought them within the Spanish or Portuguese 
“ sphere of influence,” as w*e should say nowa¬ 
days. By a curious chance they happened to be 
very near the line, and, with the inaccurate maps of 
the period, a pretty subject of quarrel was afforded 
between the Portuguese and Spanish commission¬ 
ers w T ho met at Badajos to determine the question. 
This was left undecided by the Junta, but by a 
family compact, in 1529, Charles V. ceded to his 
brother-in-law, the King of Portugal, any rights he 
might have to the Moluccas, for the sum of 350,000 
gold ducats, while he himself retained the Philip¬ 
pines, which remained under Spanish rule until 
1898, with the exception of the capture of Manila 
by the English in 1762, and its subsequent ransom. 

7 


98 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

By this means the Indian Ocean became, for 
all trade purposes, a Portuguese lake throughout 
the sixteenth century, as will be seen from the 
preceding map, showing the trading stations of 
the Portuguese all along the shores of the ocean. 
But they only possessed their monopoly for fifty 
years, for in 1580 the Spanish and Portuguese 
crowns became united on the head of Philip II., 
and by the time Portugal recovered its indepen¬ 
dence, in 1640, serious rivals had arisen to com¬ 
pete with her and Spain for the monopoly of the 
Eastern trade. 

[Authorities : Major, Prince Henry the Navigator , 1869; 
Beazeley, Prince Henry the Navigator , 1895 ; F. Hummerich, 
Vasco da Gama, 1896.] 


CHAPTER VII. 

TO THE INDIES WESTWARD-THE SPANISH 

ROUTE-COLUMBUS AND MAGELLAN. 

While the Portuguese had, with slow persis¬ 
tency, devoted nearly a century to carrying out 
Prince Henry’s idea of reaching the Indies by 
the eastward route, a bold yet simple idea had 
seized upon a Genoese sailor, which was in¬ 
tended to achieve the same purpose by sailing 
westward. The ancients, as we have seen, had 
recognised the rotundity of the earth, and Era¬ 
tosthenes had even recognised the possibility of 
reaching India by sailing westward. Certain tra¬ 
ditions of the Greeks and the Irish had placed 
mysterious islands far out to the west in the At¬ 
lantic, and the great philosopher Plato had imag- 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


99 s 


ined a country named Atlantis, far out in the 
Indian Ocean, where men were provided with all 
the gifts of nature. These views of the ancients 
came once more to the attention of the learned, 
owing to the invention of printing and the revival 
of learning, when the Greek masterpieces began 
to be made accessible in Latin, chiefly by fugitive 
Greeks from Constantinople, which had been 
taken by the Turks in 1453. Ptolemy’s geog¬ 
raphy was printed at Rome in 1462, and with 
maps in 1478. But even without the maps the- 
calculation which he had made of the length of 
the known world tended to shorten the distance 
between Portugal and Farther India by 2500 
miles. Since his time the travels of Marco Polo 
had added to the knowledge of Europe the vast 
extent of Cathay and the distant islands of 
Zipangu (Japan), which would again reduce the 
distance by another 1500 miles. As the Greek 
geographers had somewhat under-estimated the 
whole circuit of the globe, it would thus seem 
that Zipangu was not more than 4000 miles to the- 
west of Portugal. As the Azores were considered 
to be much farther off from the coast than thejr 
really were, it might easily seem, to an enthusias¬ 
tic mind, that Farther India might be reached 
when 3000 miles of the ocean had been traversed. 

This was the notion that seized the mind of 
Christopher Columbus, born at Genoa in 1446, of 
humble parentage, his father being a weaver. He 
seems to have obtained sufficient knowledge to 
enable him to study the works of the learned, 
and of the ancients in Latin translations. But 
in his early years he devoted his attention to ob¬ 
taining a practical acquaintance with seamanship. 
In his day, as we have seen, Portugal was the- 


OO THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL PISCO\ER\. 



Toscanelli’s map (restored') 












































































































TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


IOI 


centre of geographical knowledge, and he and 
his brother Bartolomeo, after many voyages 
north and south, settled at last in Lisbon—his 
brother as a map-maker, and himself as a practi¬ 
cal seaman. This was about the year 1473, and 
shortly afterwards he married Felipa Moniz, 
daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrello, an Italian 
in the service of the King of Portugal, and for 
some time Governor of Madeira. 

Now it chanced just at this time that there 
was a rumour in Portugal that a certain Italian 
philosopher, named Toscanelli, had put forth 
views as to the possibility of a westward voyage 
to Cathay, or China, and the Portuguese king 
had, through a monk named Martinez, applied 
to Toscanelli to know his views, which were 
given in a letter dated 25th June, 1474. It would 
appear that, quite independently, Columbus had 
heard the rumour, and applied to Toscanelli, for 
in the latter’s reply he, like a good business man, 
shortened his answer by giving a copy of the let¬ 
ter he had recently written to Martinez. What 
was more important and more useful, Toscanelli 
sent a map showing in hours (or degrees) the 
probable distance between Spain and Cathay 
westward. By adding the information given by 
Marco Polo to the incorrect views of Ptolemy 
about the breadth of the inhabited world, Tosca¬ 
nelli reduced the distance from the Azores to 52 0 , 
or 3120 miles. Columbus always expressed his 
indebtedness to Toscanelli’s map for his guid¬ 
ance, and, as we shall see, depended upon it very 
closely, both in steering, and in estimating the 
distance to be traversed. Unfortunately this 
map has been lost, but from a list of geographi¬ 
cal positions, with latitude and longitude, founded 


10 2 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

upon it, modern geographers have been able to 
restore it in some detail, and a simplified sketch 
of it may be here inserted, as perhaps the most 
important document in Columbus’s career. 

Certainly, whether he had the idea of reaching 
the Indies by a westward voyage before or not, 
he adopted Toscanelli’s views with enthusiasm, 
and devoted his whole life thenceforth to trying 
to carry them into operation. 

He gathered together all the information he 
could get about the fabled islands of the Atlan¬ 
tic—the Island of St. Brandan, where that Irish 
saint found happy mortals; and the Island of An- 
tilla, imagined by others, with its seven cities. 
He gathered together all the gossip he could 
hear—of mysterious corpses cast ashore on the 
Canaries, and resembling no race of men known 
to Europe; of huge canes, found on the shores 
of the same islands, evidently carved by man’s 
skill. Curiously enough, these pieces of evidence 
were logically rather against the existence of a 
westward route to the Indies than not, since they 
indicated an unknown race, but, to an enthusias¬ 
tic mind like Columbus’s, anything helped to con¬ 
firm him in his fixed idea, and besides, he could 
always reply that these material signs were from 
the unknown island of Zipangu, which Marco 
Polo had described as at some distance from the 
shores of Cathay. 

He first approached, as was natural, the King 
of Portugal, in whose land he was living, and 
whose traditional policy was directed to mari¬ 
time exploration. But the Portuguese had for 
half a century been pursuing another method of 
reaching India, and were not inclined to take up 
the novel idea of a stranger, which would 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


103 


traverse their long-continued policy of coasting 
down Africa. A hearing, however, was given to 
him, but the report was unfavourable, and Colum¬ 
bus had to turn his eyes elsewhere. There is a 
tradition that the Portuguese monarch and his- 
advisers thought rather more of Columbus’s ideas 
at first, and attempted secretly to put them into 
execution; but the pilot to whom they entrusted 
the proposed voyage lost heart as soon as he lost 
sight of land, and returned with an adverse ver¬ 
dict on the scheme. It is not known whether 
Columbus heard of this mean attempt to forestall 
him, but we find him in 1487 being assisted by the 
Spanish Court, and from that time for the next 
five years he was occupied in attempting to in¬ 
duce the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand 
and Isabella, to allow him to try his novel plan 
of reaching the Indies. The final operations in 
expelling the Moors from Spain just then en¬ 
grossed all their attention and all their capital, 
and Columbus was reduced to despair, and was- 
about to give up all hopes of succeeding in Spain, 
when one of the great financiers, a converted Jew 
named Luis de Santaguel, offered to find means 
for the voyage, and Columbus was recalled. 

On the 19th April, 1492, articles were signed* 
by which Columbus received from the Spanish 
monarchs the titles of Admiral and Viceroy of all 
the lands he might discover, as well as one-tenth 
of all the tribute to be derived from them; and 
on Friday the 3d August, of the same year, he set 
sail in three vessels, entitled the Santa Maria (the 
flagship), the Pinta, and the Nina. He started 
from the port of Palos, first for the Canary Islands. 
These he left on the 6th September, and steered 
due west. On the 13th of that month Columbus 


BEHAI M’S 










































TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 105 

observed that the needle of the compass pointed 
due north, and thus drew attention to the varia¬ 
bility of the compass. By the 21st September his 
men became mutinous and tried to force him to 
return. He induced them to continue, and four 
days afterwards the cry of “Land! land!” was 
heard, which kept up their spirits for several days, 
till, on the 1st October, large numbers of birds 
were seen. By that time Columbus had reckoned 
that he had gone some 710 leagues from the Ca¬ 
naries, and if Zipangu were in the position that 
Toscanelli’s map gave it, he ought to have been 
in its neighbourhood. It was reckoned in those 
days that a ship on an average could make four 
knots an hour, dead reckoning, which would give 
about 100 miles a day, so that Columbus might 
reckon on passing over the 3100 miles which he 
thought intervened between the Azores and Japan 
in about thirty-three days. All through the early 
days of October his courage was kept up by vari¬ 
ous signs of the nearness of land—birds and 
branches—while on the nth October, at sunset, 
they sounded and found bottom; and at ten 
o’clock, Columbus, sitting on the stern of his ves¬ 
sel, saw a light, the first sure sign of land after 
thirty-five days, and in near enough approxima¬ 
tion to Columbus’s reckoning to confirm him in the 
impression that he was approaching the mysteri¬ 
ous land of Zipangu. Next morning they landed 
on an island, called by the natives Guanahain, 
and by Columbus San Salvador. This has been 
identified as Watling Island. His first inquiry 
was as to the origin of the little plates of gold 
which he saw in the ears of the natives. They 
replied that they came from the West—another 
confirmation of his impression. Steering west- 


106 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

ward, they arrived at Cuba, and afterwards at 
Hayti (St. Domingo). Here, however, the Santa 
Maria sank, and Columbus determined to return, 
to bring the good news, after leaving some of his 
men in a fort at Hayti. The return journey was 
made in the Nina in even shorter time to the 
Azores, but afterwards severe storms arose, and 
it was not till the 15th March, 1493, that he reached 
Palos, after an absence of seven and a half months, 
•during which everybody thought that he and his 
•ships had disappeared. 

He was naturally received with great enthu¬ 
siasm by the Spaniards, and after a solemn entry 
.at Barcelona he presented to Ferdinand and Isa¬ 
bella the store of gold and curiosities carried by 
some of the natives of the islands he had visited. 
They immediately set about fitting out a much 
larger fleet of seven vessels, which started from 
■Cadiz, 25th September, 1493. He took a more 
southerly course, but again reached the islands 
now known as the West Indies. On visiting Hayti 
he found the fort destroyed, and no traces of the 
.men he had left there. It is needless for our pur¬ 
poses to go through the miserable squabbles which 
•occurred on this and his subsequent voyages, 
which resulted in Columbus’s return to Spain in 
chains and disgrace. It is only necessary for us to 
say that in his third voyage, in 1498, he touched 
•on Trinidad, and saw the coast of South America, 
which he supposed to be the region of the Terres¬ 
trial Paradise. This was placed by the mediaeval 
maps at the extreme east of the Old World. Only 
•on his fourth voyage, in 1502, did he actually 
touch the mainland, coasting along the shores 
•of Central America in the neighbourhood of Pan¬ 
ama. After many disappointments, he died, 20th 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 107 

May, 1506, at Valladolid, believing, as far as we 
can judge, to the day of his death, that what he 
had discovered was what he set out to seek—a 
westward route to the Indies, though his proud 
epitaph indicates the contrary :— 

A Castilla y a Leon I To Castille and to Leon 

Nuevo mondo dio Colon. | A New World gave Colon.* 

To this day his error is enshrined in the name we 
give to the Windward and Antilles Islands—West 
Indies: in other words, the Indies reached by the 
westward route. If they had been the Indies at 
all, they would have been the most easterly of 
them. 

Even if Columbus had discovered a new route 
to Farther India, he could not, as we have seen, 
claim the merit of having originated the idea, 
which, even in detail, he had taken from Tosca- 
nelli. But his claim is even a greater one. He 
it was who first dared to traverse unknown seas 
without coasting along the land, and his example 
was the immediate cause of all the remarkable 
discoveries that followed his earlier voyages. As 
we have seen, both Vasco da Gama and Cabral 
immediately after departed from the slow coasting 
route, and were by that means enabled to carry 
out to the full the ideas of Prince Henry; but 
whereas, by the Portuguese method of coasting, 
it had taken nearly a century to reach the Cape 
of Good Hope, within thirty years of Columbus’s 
first venture the whole globe had been circum¬ 
navigated. 

The first aim of his successors was to ascer- 


Columbus’s Spanish name was Cristoval Colon. 



108 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

tain more clearly what it was that Columbus had 
discovered. Immediately after Columbus’s third 
voyage, in 1498, and after the news of Vasco 
da Gama’s successful passage to the Indies had 
made it necessary to discover some strait leading 
from the “West Indies” to India itself, a Spanish 
gentleman, named Hojeda, fitted out an expedi¬ 
tion at his own expense, with an Italian pilot on 
board, named Amerigo Vespucci, and tried once 
more to find a strait to India near Trinidad. 
They were, of course, unsuccessful, but they 
coasted along and landed on the north coast of 
South America, which, from certain resemblances, 
they termed Little Venice (Venezuela). Next 
year, as we have seen, Cabral, in following Vasco 
da Gama, hit upon Brazil, which turned out to be 
within the Portuguese “ sphere of influence,” as 
determined by the line of demarcation. 

But, three months previous to Cabral’s touch¬ 
ing upon Brazil, one of Columbus’s companions 
on his first voyage, Vincenta Yanez Pinzon, had 
touched on the coast of Brazil, eight degrees 
south of the line, and from there had worked 
northward, seeking for a passage which would 
lead west to the Indies. He discovered the 
mouth of the Amazon, but, losing two of his 
vessels, returned to Palos, which he reached in 
September, 1500. 

This discovery of an unknown and unsus¬ 
pected continent so far south of the line created 
great interest, and shortly after Cabral’s return 
Amerigo Vespucci was sent out in 1501 by the 
King of Portugal as pilot of a fleet which should 
explore the new land discovered by Cabral and 
claim it for the Crown of Portugal. His instruc¬ 
tions were to ascertain how much of it was within 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


109 

the line of demarcation. Vespucci reached the 
Brazilian coast at Cape St. Roque, and then ex¬ 
plored it very thoroughly right down to the river 
La Plata, which was too far west to come within 
the Portuguese sphere. Amerigo and his com¬ 
panions struck out south-eastward till they 
reached the island of St. Georgia, 1200 miles east 
of Cape Horn, where the cold and the floating ice 
drove them back, and they returned to Lisbon, 
after having gone farthest south up to their time. 

This voyage of Amerigo threw a new light 
upon the nature of the discovery made by Colum¬ 
bus. Whereas he had thought he had discovered 
a route to India and had touched upon Farther 
India, Amerigo and his companions had shown 
that there was a hitherto unsuspected land inter¬ 
vening between Columbus’s discoveries and the 
long-desired Spice Islands of Farther India- 
Amerigo, in describing his discoveries, ventured 
so far as to suggest that they constituted a New 
World; and a German professor, named Martin 
Waldseemuller, who wrote an introduction to 
Cosmography in 1506, which included an account 
of Amerigo’s discoveries, suggested that this New 
World should be called after him, America, after 
the analogy of Asia, Africa, and Europe. For a 
long time the continent which we now know as 
South America was called simply the New World, 
and was supposed to be joined on to the east 
coast of Asia. The name America was sometimes 
applied to it—not altogether inappropriately, 
since it was Amerigo’s voyage which definitely 
settled that really new lands had been discovered 
by the western route; and when it was further 
ascertained that this new land was joined, not to 
Asia, but to another continent as large as itself, 


no THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

the two new lands were distinguished as North 
and South America. 

It was, at any rate, clear from Amerigo’s dis¬ 
covery that the westward route to the Spice 



Amerigo Vespucci. 


Islands would have to be through or round this 
New World discovered by him, and a Portuguese 
noble, named Fernao Magelhaens, was destined 
to discover the practicability of this route. He 
had served his native country under Almeida and 
Albuquerque in the East Indies, and was present 
at the capture of Malacca in 15 n, and from that 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


Ill 


port was despatched by Albuquerque with three 
ships to visit the far-famed Spice Islands. They 
visited Amboyna and Banda, and learned enough 
of the abundance and cheapness of the spices of 
the islands to recognise their importance; but 
under the direction of Albuquerque, who only 
sent them out on an exploring expedition, they 
returned to him, leaving behind them, however, 
one of Magelhaens’ greatest friends, Francisco 
Serrao, who settled in Ternate and from time to 
time sent glowing accounts of the Moluccas to 
his friend Magelhaens. He in the meantime re¬ 
turned to Portugal, and was employed on an ex¬ 
pedition to Morocco. He was not, however, well 
treated by the Portuguese monarch, and deter¬ 
mined to leave his service for that of Charles V., 
though he made it a condition of his entering his 
service that he should make no discoveries 
within the boundaries of the King of Portugal, 
and do nothing prejudicial to his interests. 

This was in the year 1517, and two years 
elapsed before Magelhaens started on his cele¬ 
brated voyage. He had represented to the 
Emperor that he was convinced that a strait 
existed which would lead into the Indian Ocean, 
past the New World of Amerigo, and that the 
Spice Islands were beyond the line of demarca¬ 
tion and within the Spanish sphere of influence. 
There is some evidence that Spanish merchant 
vessels, trading secretly to obtain Brazil wood, 
had already caught sight of the strait afterwards 
named after Magelhaens, and certainly such a 
strait is represented upon Schoner’s globes dated 
1515 and 1520—earlier than Magelhaens’ dis¬ 
covery. The Portuguese were fully aware of the 
dangers threatened to their monopoly of the 


112 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 


spice trade—which by this time had been firmly 
established—owing to the presence of Serrao in 
Ternate, and did all in their power to dissuade 
Charles from sending out the threatened expedi¬ 
tion, pointing out that they would consider it an 
unfriendly act if such an expedition were per¬ 
mitted to start. Notwithstanding this the Em¬ 
peror persisted in the project, and on Tuesday, 
20th September, 1519, a fleet of five vessels, the 
Trinidad , St. Antonio, Concepcion , Victoria , and St. 
/ago , manned by a heterogeneous collection of 
Spaniards, Portuguese, Basques, Genoese, Sicili¬ 
ans, French, Flemings, Germans, Greeks, Neapol¬ 
itans, Corfiotes, Negroes, Malays, and a single 
Englishman (Master Andrew of Bristol), started 
from Seville upon perhaps the most important 
voyage of discovery ever made. So great was 
the antipathy between Spanish and Portuguese 
that disaffection broke out almost from the 
start, and after the mouth of the La Plata had 
been carefully explored, to ascertain whether this 
was not really the beginning of a passage through 
the New World, a mutiny broke out on the 2nd 
April, 1520, in Port St. Julian, where it had been 
determined to winter; for of course by this 
time the sailors had become aware that the time 
of the seasons was reversed in the Southern 
Hemisphere. Magelhaens showed great firmness 
and skill in dealing with the mutiny; its chief 
leaders were either executed or marooned, and on 
the 18th October he resumed his voyage. Mean¬ 
while the habits and customs of the natives had 
been observed—their huge height and uncouth 
foot-coverings, for which Magelhaens gave them 
the name of Patagonians. Within three days 
they had arrived at the entrance of the passage 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 113 

which still bears Magelhaens’ name. By this 
time one of the ships, the St. /ago , had been 
lost, and it was with only four of his vessels—the 
Trinidad , the Victoria , the Concepcion , and the St. 
Antonio —that Magelhaens began his passage. 
There are many twists and divisions in the 



Ferdinand Magellan. 


strait, and on arriving at one of the partings, 
Magelhaens despatched the St. Antonio to explore 
it, while he proceeded with the other three ships 
along the more direct route. The pilot of the 
St. Antonio had been one of the mutineers, and 
persuaded the crew to seize the opportunity to 
turn back altogether; so that when Magelhaens 
arrived at the appointed place of junction, no 
8 


114 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

news could be ascertained of the missing vessel; 
it went straight back to Portugal. Magelhaens 
determined to continue his search, even, he said, 
if it came to eating the leather thongs of the 
sails. It had taken him thirty-eight days to get 
through the Straits, and for four months after¬ 
wards Magelhaens continued his course through 
the ocean, which, from its calmness, he called 
Pacific; taking a north-westerly course, and thus, 
by a curious chance, only hitting upon a couple 
of small uninhabited islands throughout their 
whole voyage, through a sea which we now know 
to be dotted by innumerable inhabited islands. 
On the 6th March, 1520, they had sighted the 
Ladrones, and obtained much-needed provisions. 
Scurvy had broken out in its severest form, and 
the only Englishman on the ships died at the 
Ladrones. From there they went on to the 
islands now known as the Philippines, one of the 
kings of which greeted them very favourably. 
As a reward Magelhaens undertook one of his 
local quarrels, and fell in an unequal fight at 
Mactan, 27th April, 1521. The three vessels 
continued their course for the Moluccas, but the 
Concepcion proved so unseaworthy that they had 
to beach and burn her. They reached Borneo, 
and here Juan Sebastian del Cano was appointed 
captain of the Victoria. 

At last, on the 6th November, 1521, they 
reached the goal of their journey, and anchored 
at Tidor, one of the Moluccas. They traded 
on very advantageous terms with the natives, 
and filled their holds with the spices and nut¬ 
megs for which they had journeyed so far; but 
when they attempted to resume their journey 
homeward, it was found that the Trinidad was 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


JI 5 

too unseaworthy to proceed at once, and it was 
decided that the Victoria should start so as to get 
the east monsoon. This she did, and after the 
usual journey round the Cape of Good Hope, 
arrived off the Mole of Seville on Monday the 
8th September, 1522—three years all but twelve 
days from the date of their departure from 
Spain. Of the two hundred and seventy men 
who had started with the fleet, only eighteen re¬ 
turned with the Victoria. According to the ship’s 
reckoning they had arrived on Sunday, the 7th, 
and for some time it was a puzzle to account for 
the day thus lost. 

Meanwhile the Trinidad,\ which had been left 
behind at the Moluccas, had attempted to sail 
back to Panama, and reached as far north as 43 0 , 
somewhere about longitude 175 0 W. Here pro¬ 
visions failed them, and they had to return to the 
Moluccas, where they were seized, practically as 
pirates, by a fleet of Portuguese vessels sent spe¬ 
cially to prevent interference by the Spaniards 
with the Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade. 
The crew of the Trinidad were seized and made 
prisoners, and ultimately only four of them 
reached Spain again, after many adventures. 
Thirteen others, who had landed at the Cape de 
Verde Islands from the Victoria , may also be in¬ 
cluded among the survivors of the fleet, so that a 
total number of thirty-five out of two hundred 
and seventy sums up the number of the first cir¬ 
cumnavigators of the globe. 

The importance of this voyage was unique 
when regarded from the point of view of geo¬ 
graphical discovery. It decisively clinched the 
matter with regard to the existence of an entirely 
New World independent from Asia. In particu- 


I 


116 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

lar, the backward voyage of the Trinidad (which 
has rarely been noticed) had shown that there 
was a wide expanse of ocean north of the line 
and east of Asia, whilst the previous voyage had 
shown the enormous extent of sea south of the 
line. After the circumnavigation of the Victoria 
it was clear to cosmographers that the world was 
much larger than had been imagined by the an¬ 
cients ; or rather, perhaps one may say that Asia 
was smaller than had been thought by the medi¬ 
aeval writers. The dogged persistence shown by 
Magelhaens in carrying out his idea, which turned 
out to be a perfectly justifiable one, raises him 
from this point of view to a greater height than 
Columbus, whose month’s voyage brought him 
exactly where he thought he would find land ac¬ 
cording to Toscanelli’s map. After Magelhaens, 
as will be seen, the whole coast lines of the world 
were roughly known, except for the Arctic Circle 
and for Australia. 

The Emperor was naturally delighted with 
the result of the voyage. He granted Del Cano 
a pension, and a coat of arms commemorating 
his services. The terms of the grant are very 
significant: or, two cinnamon sticks saltire proper, 
three nutmegs and twelve cloves, a chief gules, a 
castle or; crest, a globe, bearing the motto, 
“ Primus circumdedisti me ” (thou wert the first 
to go round me); supporters, two Malay kings 
crowned, holding in the exterior hand a spice 
branch proper. The castle, of course, refers to 
Castile, but the rest of the blazon indicates the 
importance attributed to the voyage as resting 
mainly upon the visit to the Spice Islands. As 
we have already seen, however, the Portuguese 
recovered their position in the Moluccas im- 


TO THE INDIES WESTWARD. 


117 


mediately after the departure of the Victoria , 
and seven years later Charles V. gave up any 





claims he might possess through Magelhaens* 
visit. 

But for a long time afterwards the Spaniards 


The World according to the Ptolemy of 1, 



















118 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

still cast longing eyes upon the Spice Islands, 
and the Fuggers, the great bankers of Augsburg, 
who financed the Spanish monarch, for a long 
time attempted to get possession of Peru, with 
the scarcely disguised object of making it a 
“jumping-place” from which to make a fresh 
attempt at obtaining possession of the Moluccas. 
A modern parallel wfill doubtless occur to the 
reader. 

There are thus three stages to be distinguished 
in the successive discovery and delimitation of 
the New World:— 

(i.) At first Columbus imagined that he had 
actually reached Zipangu or Japan, and achieved 
the object of his voyage. 

(ii.) Then Amerigo Vespucci, by coasting down 
South America, ascertained that there was a huge 
unknown land intervening even between Colum¬ 
bus’s discoveries and the long-desired Spice 
Islands. 

(iii.) Magelhaens clinches this view by tra¬ 
versing the Southern Pacific for thousands of 
miles before reaching the Moluccas. 

There is still a fourth stage by which it was 
gradually discovered that the North-west of 
America was not joined on to Asia, but this stage 
was only gradually reached and finally deter¬ 
mined by the voyages of Bering and Cook. 


[Authorities : Justin Winsor, Christopher Columbus , 1894 ; 
Guillemard, Ferdinand Magellan, 1894.] 


TO THE INDIES NORTHWARDS. 


II 9 


CHAPTER VIII. 

TO THE INDIES NORTHWARDS—ENGLISH, FRENCH, 
DUTCH, AND RUSSIAN ROUTES. 

The discovery of the New World had the most 
important consequences on the relative impor¬ 
tance of the different nations of Europe. Hith¬ 
erto the chief centres for over two thousand 
years had been round the shores of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, and, as we have seen, Venice, by her cen¬ 
tral position and extensive trade to the East, had 
become a world-centre during the latter Middle 
Ages. But after Columbus, and still more after 
Magelhaens, the European nations on the Atlan¬ 
tic were found to be closer to the New World, 
and, in a measure, closer to the Spice Islands, 
which they could reach all the way by ship, in¬ 
stead of having to pay expensive land freights. 
The trade routes through Germany became at 
once neglected, and it was only in the nineteenth 
century that she at all recovered from the blow 
given to her by the discovery of the new sea 
routes in which she could not join. But to Eng¬ 
land, France, and the Low Countries the new 
outlook promised a share in the world’s trade and 
affairs generally, which they had never hitherto 
possessed while the Mediterranean was the centre 
of commerce. If the Indies could be reached by 
sea, they were almost in as fortunate a position 
as Portugal or Spain. Almost as soon as the new 
routes were discovered the Northern nations at¬ 
tempted to utilise them, notwithstanding the Bull of 
Partition, which the French king laughed at, and 
the Protestant English and Dutch had no reason 


120 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

to respect. Within three years of the return of 
Columbus from his first voyage, Henry VII. em¬ 
ployed John Cabot, a Venetian settled in Bristol, 
with his three sons, to attempt the voyage to the 
Indies by the North-West Passage. He appears 
to have re-discovered Newfoundland in 1497, and 
then in the following year, failing to find a pas¬ 
sage there, coasted down North America nearly 
as far as Florida. 

In J 534 Jacques Cartier examined the river 
St. Lawrence, and his discoveries were later fol¬ 
lowed up by Samuel de Champlain, who explored 
some of the great lakes near the St. Lawrence, 
and established the French rule in Canada, or 
Acadie, as it was then called. 

Meanwhile the English had made an attempt 
to reach the Indies, 'still by a northern passage, 
but this time in an easterly direction. Sebastian 
Cabot, who had been appointed Grand Pilot of 
England by Edward VI., directed a voyage of 
exploration in 1553, under Sir Hugh Willoughby. 
Only one of these ships, with the pilot (Richard 
Chancellor) on board, survived the voyage, reach¬ 
ing Archangel, and then going overland to Mos¬ 
cow, where he was favourably received by the 
Czar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible. He was, how¬ 
ever, drowned on his return, and no further at¬ 
tempt to reach Cathay by sea was attempted. 

The North-West Passage seemed thus to prom¬ 
ise better than that by the North-East, and in 
1576 Martin Frobisher started on an exploring 
voyage, after having had the honour of a wave 
of Elizabeth’s hand as he passed Greenwich. 
He reached Greenland, and then Labrador, and, 
in a subsequent voyage next year, discovered the 
strait named after him. His project was taken 


TO THE INDIES NORTHWARDS. 


21 


up by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on whom, with his. 
brother Adrian, Elizabeth conferred the privilege 
of making the passage to China and the Moluccas 
by the north-westward, north-eastward, or north¬ 
ward route. At the same time a patent was 
granted him for discovering any lands unsettled 
by Christian princes. A settlement was made in 
St. John’s, Newfoundland, but on the return 
voyage, near the Azores, Sir Humphrey’s 
“ frigate ” (a small boat of ten men), disappeared, 
after he had been heard to call out, “ Courage,, 
my lads; we are as near heaven by sea as by- 
land!” This happened in 1583. 

Two years after, another expedition was sent: 
out by the merchants of London, under John 
Davis, who, on this and two subsequent voyages,, 
discovered several passages trending westward,, 
which warranted the hope of finding a north-west 
passage. Beside the strait named after him, it is. 
probable that on his third voyage, in 1587, he: 
passed through the passage now named after 
Hudson. His discoveries were not followed up 
for some' twenty years, when Henry Hudson was 
despatched in 1607 with a crew of ten men and a 
boy. He reached Spitzbergen, and reached 8o° 
N., and in the following year reached the North 
(Magnetic) Pole, which was then situated at 
75.22 0 N. Two of his men were also fortunate 
enough to see a mermaid—probably an Eskimo 
woman in her kayak. In a third voyage, in 1609,. 
he discovered the strait and bay which now bear 
his name, but was marooned by his crew, and 
never heard of further. He had previously, for 
a time, passed into the service of the Dutch, and 
had guided them to the river named after him, 
on which New York now stands. The course of 


122 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

English discovery in the north was for a time 
concluded by the voyage of William Baffin in 1615, 
which resulted in the discovery of the land named 
after him, as well as many of the islands to the 
north of America. 

Meanwhile the Dutch had taken part in 4 the 
work of discovery towards the north. They had 
revolted against the despotism of Philip II., who 
was now monarch of both Spain and Portugal. 
At first they attempted to adopt a route which 
would not bring them into collision with their 
old masters; and in three voyages, between 1594 
and 1597, William Barentz attempted the North- 
East Passage, under the auspices of the States- 
General. He discovered Cherry Island, and 
touched on Spitzbergen, but failed in the main 
object of his search; and the attention of the 
Dutch was henceforth directed to seizing the 
Portuguese route, rather than finding a new one 
for themselves. 

The reason they were able to do this is a 
curious instance of Nemesis in history. Owing 
to the careful series of intermarriages planned 
out by Ferdinand of Arragon, the Portuguese 
Crown and all its possessions became joined to 
Spain in 1580 under Philip II., just a year after 
the northern provinces of the Netherlands had 
renounced allegiance to Spain. Consequently 
they were free to attack not alone Spanish vessels 
and colonies, but also those previously belonging 
to Portugal. As early as 1596 Cornelius Hout- 
man rounded the Cape and visited Sumatra and 
Bantam, and within fifty years the Dutch had 
replaced the Portuguese in many of their Eastern 
possessions. In 1614 they took Malacca, and 
with it the command of the Spice Islands; by 


TO THE INDIES N(^.TH WARDS. 


I2 3 


1658 they had secured full possession of Ceylon. 
Much earlier, in 1619, they had founded Batavia 
in Java, which they made the centre of their 
East Indian possessions, as it still remains. 

The English at first attempted to imitate the 
Dutch in their East Indian policy. The English 
East India Company was founded by Elizabeth 
in 1600, and as early as 1619 had forced the 
Dutch to allow them to take a third share of the 
profits of the Spice Islands. In order to do this 
several English planters settled at Amboyna, but 
within four years trade rivalries had reached such 
a pitch that the Dutch murdered some of these 
merchants and drove the rest from the islands. 
As a consequence the English Company devoted 
its attention to the mainland of India itself, where 
they soon obtained possession of Madras and 
Bombay, and left the islands of the Indian Ocean 
mainly in possession of the Dutch. We shall see 
later the effect of this upon the history of geog¬ 
raphy, for it was owing to their possession of the 
East India Islands that the Dutch were practi¬ 
cally the discoverers of Australia. One result of 
the Dutch East India policy has left its traces 
even to the present day. In 1651 they established 
a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, which only 
fell into English hands during the Napoleonic 
wars, when Napoleon held Holland. 

Meanwhile the English had not lost sight of 
the possibilities of the North-East Passage, if not 
for reaching the Spice Islands, at any rate as a 
means of tapping the overland route to China, 
hitherto monopolised by the Genoese. In 1558 
an English gendeman, named Anthony Jenkinson, 
was sent as ambassador to the Czar of Muscovy, 
and travelled from Moscow as far as Bokhara; 


124 THE story of geographical discovery. 


but he was not very fortunate in his venture, and 
England had to be content for some time to re¬ 
ceive her Indian and Chinese goods from the 
Venetian argosies as before. But at last they 
saw no reason why they should not attempt direct 
relations with the East. A company of Levant 
merchants was formed in 1583 to open out direct 
communications with Aleppo, Bagdad, Ormuz, and 
Goa. They were unsuccessful at the two latter 
places owing to the jealousy of the Portuguese, 
but they made arrangements for cheaper transit 
of Eastern goods to England, and in 1587 the last 
of the Venetian argosies, a great vessel of eleven 
hundred tons, was wrecked off the Isle of Wight. 
Henceforth the English conducted their own 
business with the East, and Venetian and Portu¬ 
guese monopoly was at an end. 

But the journeys of Chancellor and Jenkinson 
to the Court of Moscow had more far-reaching- 
effects; the Russians themselves were thereby 
led to contemplate utilising their proximity to 
one of the best known routes to the Far East. 
Shortly after Jenkinson’s visit, the Czar, Ivan the 
Terrible, began extending his dominions east¬ 
ward, sending at first a number of troops to ac¬ 
company the Russian merchant Strogonof as far 
as the Obi in search of sables. Among the troops, 
were a corps of six thousand Cossacks commanded 
by one named Vassili Yermak, who, finding the 
Tartars an easy prey, determined at first to set 
up a new kingdom for himself. In 1579 he was 
successful in overcoming the Tartars and their 
chief town Sibir, near Tobolsk; but, finding it 
difficult to retain his position, determined to- 
return to his allegiance to the Czar on condition 
of being supported. This was readily granted. 


TO THE INDIES NORTHWARDS. 


12 5 


and from that time onward the Russians steadily 
pushed on through to the unknown country of 
the north of Asia, since named after the little 
town conquered by Yermak, of which scarcely 
any traces now remain. As early as 1639 they 
had reached the Pacific under Kupilof. A force 
was sent out from Yakutz, on the Lena, in 1643, 



which reached the Amur, and thus Russians came 
for the first time in contact with the Chinese, and 
a new method of reaching Cathay was thus ob¬ 
tained, while geography gained the knowledge of 
the extent of Northern Asia. For, about the 
same time (in 1648), the Arctic Ocean was 
reached on the north shores of Siberia, and a 















126 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

fleet under the Cossack Dishinef sailed from Ko¬ 
lyma and reached as far as the straits known by 
the name of Bering. It was not, however, till 
fifty years afterwards, in 1696, that the Russians 
reached Kamtschatka. 

Notwithstanding the access of knowledge 
which had been gained by these successive bold 
pushes towards north and east, it still remained 
uncertain whether Siberia did not join on to the 
northern part of the New World discovered by 
Columbus and Amerigo, and in 1728 Peter the 
Great sent out an expedition under Vitus Be¬ 
ring, a Dane in the Russian service, with the ex¬ 
press aim of ascertaining this point. He reached 
Kamtschatka, and there built two vessels as 
directed by the Czar, and started on his voyage 
northward, coasting along the land. When he 
reached a little beyond 67° N., he found no land 
to the north or east, and conceived he had reached 
the end of the continent. As a matter of fact, he 
was within thirty miles of the west coast of Amer¬ 
ica; but of this he does not seem to have been 
aware, being content with solving the special 
problem put before him by the Czar. The strait 
thus discovered by Bering, though not known 
by him to be a strait, has ever since been known 
by his name. In 1741, however, Bering again set 
out on a voyage of discovery to ascertain how 
far to the east America was, and within a fort¬ 
night had come within sight of the lofty moun¬ 
tain named by him, Mount St. Elias. Bering him¬ 
self died upon this voyage, on an island also 
named after him ; he had at last solved the rela¬ 
tion between the Old and the New Worlds. 

These voyages of Bering, however, belong to 
a much later stage of discovery than those we 


TO THE INDIES NORTHWARDS. 


127 


Aave hitherto been treating for the last three 
chapters. His explorations were undertaken 
mainly for scientific purposes, and to solve a scien¬ 
tific problem, whereas all the other researches 
of Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch 
were directed to one end, that of reaching the 
Spice Islands and Cathay. The Portuguese at 
first started out on the search by the slow method 
of creeping down the coast of Africa; the Spanish, 
by adopting Columbus’s bold idea, had attempted 
it by the western route, and under Magellan’s still 
bolder conception had equally succeeded in reach¬ 
ing it in that way; the English and French sought 
for a north-west passage to the Moluccas; while 
the English and Dutch attempted a north-easterly 
route. In both directions the icy barrier of the 
north prevented success. It was reserved, as we 
shall see, for the present century to complete 
the North-West Passage under Maclure, and the 
North-East by Nordenskiold, sailing with quite 
different motives to those which first brought the 
mariners of England, France and Holland within 
the Arctic Circle. 

The net result of all these attempts by the 
nations of Europe to wrest from the Venetians 
the monopoly of the Eastern trade was to add to 
geography the knowledge of the existence of 
a New World intervening between the western 
shores of Europe and the eastern shores of Asia. 
We have yet to learn the means by which the 
New World thus discovered became explored and 
possessed by the European nations. 

[. Authorities: Cooley and Beazeley, John and Sebastian 
Cabot, 1898.] 


128 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 


CHAPTER IX. 

THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 

We have hitherto been dealing with the dis¬ 
coveries made by Spanish and Portuguese along 
the coast of the New World, but early in the six¬ 
teenth century they began to put foot on terra 
firma and explore the interior. As early as 1513 
Vasco Nunez de Balboa ascended the highest 
peak in the range running from the Isthmus of 
Panama, and saw for the first time by European 
eyes the great ocean afterwards to be named by 
Magellan the Pacific. He there heard that the 
country to the south extended without end, and 
was inhabited by great nations, with an abun¬ 
dance of gold. Among his companions who heard 
of this golden country, or El Dorado, was one 
Francisco Pizarro, who was destined to test the 
report. But a similar report had reached the 
ears of Diego Velasquez, governor of Cuba, as to 
a great nation possessed of much gold to the 
north of Darien. He accordingly despatched his 
lieutenant Hernando Cortes in 1519 to investi¬ 
gate, with ten ships, six hundred and fifty men, 
and some eighteen horses. When he landed at 
the port named by him Vera Cruz, the appearance 
of his men, and more especially of his horses, as¬ 
tonished and alarmed the natives of Mexico, then 
a large and semi-civilised state under the rule of 
Montezuma, the last representative of the Aztecs, 
who in the twelfth century had succeeded the 
Toltecs, a people that had settled on the Mexican 
table-land as early probably as the seventh cen¬ 
tury, introducing the use of metals and roads and 


THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 129 

many of the elements of civilisation. Montezuma 
is reported to have been able to range no less 
than two hundred thousand men under his ban¬ 
ners, but he showed his opinion of the Spaniards 
by sending them costly presents, gold and silver 
and costly stuffs. This only aroused the cupidity 
of Cortes, who determined to make a bold stroke 
for the conquest of such a rich prize. He burnt 
his ships and advanced into the interior of the 
country, conquering on his way the tribe of the 
Tlascalans, who had been at war with the Mexi¬ 
cans, but, when conquered, were ready to assist 
him against them. With their aid he succeeded 
in seizing the Mexican king, who was forced to 
yield a huge tribute. After many struggles Cor¬ 
tes found himself master of the capital, and of all 
the resources of the Mexican Empire (1521). 
These he hastened to place at the feet of the Em¬ 
peror Charles V., who appointed him Governor 
and Captain-General of Mexico. It is character¬ 
istic throughout the history of the New World, 
that none of the soldiers of fortune who found it 
such an easy prey ever thought of setting up an 
empire for himself. This is a testimony to the 
influence national feeling had upon the minds 
even of the most lawless, and the result was that 
Europe and European ideas were brought over 
into America, or rather the New World became 
tributary to Europe. 

As soon as Cortes had established himself he 
fitted out expeditions to explore the country, and 
himself reached Honduras after a remarkable 
journey for over 1000 miles, in which he was 
only guided by a map on cotton cloth, on which 
the Cacique of Tabasco had painted all the towns, 
rivers, and mountains of the country as far as 

9 


130 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Nicaragua. He also despatched a small fleet un¬ 
der Alvarro de Saavedra to support a Spanish ex¬ 
pedition which had been sent to the Moluccas 
under Sebastian del Cano, and which arrived at 
Tidor in 1527, to the astonishment of Spanish 
and Portuguese alike when they heard he had 
started from New Castile. In 1536, Cortes, who 
had been in the meantime shorn of much of his 
power, conducted an expedition by sea along the 
north-west coast of Mexico, and reached what he 
considered to be a great island. He identified this 
with an imaginary island in the Far East, near the 
terrestrial paradise to which the name of Califor¬ 
nia had been given in a contemporary romance. 
Thus, owing to Cortes, almost the whole of Cen¬ 
tral America had become known before his death 
in 1540. Similarly, at a much earlier period, 
Ponce de Leon had thought he had discovered 
another great island in Florida in 1512, whither 
he had gone in search of Bayuca, a fabled island 
of the Indians, in which they stated was a foun¬ 
tain of eternal youth. At the time of Cortes’ first 
attempt on Mexico, Pineda had coasted round 
Florida, and connected it with the rest of the 
coast of Mexico, which he traversed as far as 
Vera Cruz. 

The exploits of Cortes were all important in 
their effects. He had proved with what ease a 
handful of men might overcome an empire and 
gain unparalleled riches. Francisco Pizarro was 
encouraged by the success of Cortes to attempt 
the discovery of the El Dorado he had heard of 
when on Balboa’s expedition. With a companion 
named Diego de Almegro he made several coast¬ 
ing expeditions down the north-west coast of 
South America, during which they heard of the 


THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 


131 

empire of the Incas on the plateau of Peru. They 
also obtained sufficient gold and silver to raise 
their hopes of the riches of the country, and re¬ 
turned to Spain to report to the Emperor. Pi- 
zarro obtained permission from Charles V. to at¬ 
tempt the conquest of Peru, of which he was 
named Governor and Captain-General, on condi¬ 
tion of paying a tribute of one-fifth of the treas¬ 
ure he might obtain. He started in February, 
1531, with a small force of 180 men, of whom 
thirty-six were horsemen. Adopting the policy 
of Cortes, he pushed directly for the capital 
Cuzco, where they managed to seize Atahualpa,. 
the Inca of the time. He attempted to ransom 
himself by agreeing to fill the room in which he 
was confined, twenty-two feet long by sixteen 
wdde, with bars of gold as high as the hand could 
reach. He carried out this prodigious promise,, 
and Pizarro’s companions found themselves in pos¬ 
session of booty equal to three millions sterling. 

Atahualpa was, however, not released, but 
condemned to death on a frivolous pretext, while 
Pizarro dismissed his followers, fully confident 
that the wealth they carried off would attract as. 
many men as he could desire to El Dorado. He 
settled himself at Lima, near the coast, in 1534. 
Meanwhile Almegro had been despatched south,, 
and made himself master of Chili. Another 
expedition in 1539 was conducted by Pizarro’s. 
brother Gonzales across the Andes, and reached 
the sources of the Amazon, which one of his 
companions, Francisco de Orellana, traversed as. 
far as the mouth. This he reached in August, 
1541, after a voyage of one thousand leagues. 
The river was named after Orellana, but, from 
reports he made of the existence of a tribe of 


132 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

female warriors, was afterwards known as the 
river of the Amazons. The author spread re¬ 
ports of another El Dorado to the north, in 
which the roofs of the temples were covered 
with gold. This report afterwards led to the 
disastrous expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh to 
Guiana. By his voyage Orellana connected the 
Spanish and Portuguese “spheres of influence” 
in the New World of Amerigo. By the year 
1540 the main outlines of Central and South 
America and something of the interior had been 
made known by the Spanish adventurers within 
half a century of Columbus’s first voyage. Ow¬ 
ing to the papal bull Portugal possessed Brazil, 
but all the rest of the huge stretch of country 
was claimed for Spain. The Portuguese wisely 
treated Brazil as an outlet for their overflowing 
population, which settled there in large numbers 
and established plantations. The Spaniards, on 
the other hand, only regarded their huge posses¬ 
sions as exclusive markets to be merely visited 
by them. Rich mines of gold, silver, and mercury 
were discovered in Mexico and Peru, especially 
in the far-famed mines of Potosi, and these were 
exploited entirely in the interests of Spain, which 
acted as a sieve by which the precious metals 
were poured into Europe, raising prices through¬ 
out the Old World. In return European merchan¬ 
dise was sent in the return voyages of the Span¬ 
ish galleons to New Spain, which could only buy 
Flemish cloth, for example, through Spanish in¬ 
termediaries, who raised its price to three times 
the original cost. This short-sighted policy on 
the part of Spain naturally encouraged smug¬ 
gling, and attracted the ships of all nations 
towards that pursuit. 


THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 


133 


We have already seen the first attempts of the 
French and English in the exploration of the 
north-east coast of North America ; but during 
the sixteenth century very little was done to- 
settle on such inhospitable shores, which did not 
offer anything like the rich prizes that Tropical 
America afforded. Neither the exploration of 
Cartier in 1534, or that of the Cabots much 
earlier, was followed by any attempt to possess, 
the land. Breton fishermen visited the fisheries 
off Newfoundland, and various explorers at¬ 
tempted to find openings which would give them 
a north-west passage, but otherwise the more 
northerly part of the continent was left unoccu¬ 
pied till the beginning of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury. The first town founded was that of St. 
Augustine, in Florida, in 1565, but this was de¬ 
stroyed three years later by a French expedition. 
Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found a colony- 
in 1584 near where Virginia now stands, but it 
failed after three years, and it was not till the 
reign of James I. that an organised attempt was. 
made by England to establish plantations, as. 
they were then called, on the North American 
coast. 

Two Chartered Companies, the one to the 
north named the Plymouth Company, and the 
one to the south named the London Company 
(both founded in 1606), nominally divided be¬ 
tween them all the coast from Nova Scotia to 
Florida. These large tracts of country were dur¬ 
ing the seventeenth century slowly parcelled out 
into smaller states, mainly Puritan in the north 
(New England), High Church and Catholic in the 
south (Virginia and Maryland). But between 
the two, and on the banks of the Hudson and the 


134 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Delaware, two other European nations had also 
formed plantations—the Dutch along the Hud¬ 
son from 1609 forming the New Netherlands, and 
the Swedes from 1636 along the Delaware form¬ 
ing New Sweden. The latter, however, lasted 
only a few years, and was absorbed by the Dutch 
in 1655. The capital of New Netherlands was es¬ 
tablished on Manhattan Island, to the south of 
the palisade still known as Wall Street, and the 
city was named New Amsterdam. The Hudson 
is such an important artery of commerce between 
the Atlantic and the great lakes, that this wedge 
between the two sets of English colonies would 
have been a bar to any future progress. This 
was recognised by Charles II., who in 1664 de¬ 
spatched an expedition to demand its surrender, 
even though England and Holland were at that 
time at peace. New Amsterdam was taken, and 
named New York, after the king’s brother, the 
Duke of York, afterwards James II. New Sweden, 
which at the same time fell into the English 
hands, was sold as a proprietary plantation to a 
Jersey man, Sir George Carteret, and to a Quaker, 
William Penn. By this somewhat high-handed 
procedure the whole coast-line down to Florida 
was in English hands. 

Both the London and Plymouth Companies 
had started to form plantations in 1607, and in 
that very year the French made their first effec¬ 
tive settlements in America, at Port Royal and at 
Nova Scotia, then called Acadie; while, the fol¬ 
lowing year, Samuel de Champlain made settle¬ 
ments at Quebec, and founded French Canada. 
He explored the lake country, and established 
settlements down the banks of the St. Lawrence, 
along which French activity for a long time con 


THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 


x 35 

fined itself. Between the French and the English 
settlements roved the warlike Five Nations of the 
Iroquois Indians, and Champlain, whose settle¬ 
ments were in the country of the Algonquins, was 
obliged to take their part and make the Iroquois 
the enemies of France, which had important ef¬ 
fects upon the final struggle between England 
and France in the eighteenth century. The 
French continued their exploration of the interior 
of the continent. In 1673 Marquette discovered 
the Mississippi (Missi Sepe, “ the great water”), 
and descended it as far as the mouth of the Ar¬ 
kansas, but the work of exploring the Mississippi 
valley was undertaken by Robert de la Salle. He 
had already discovered the Ohio and Illinois 
rivers, and in three expeditions, between 1680 and 
1682, succeeded in working his way right down 
to the mouth of the Mississippi, giving to the huge 
tract of country which he had thus traversed the 
name of Louisiana, after Louis XIV. 

France thenceforth claimed the whole hinter¬ 
land , as we should now call it, of North America, 
the English being confined to the comparatively 
narrow strip of country east of the Alleghanies. 
New Orleans was founded at the mouth of the 
Mississippi in 1716, and named after the Prince 
Regent; and French activity ranged between 
Quebec and New Orleans, leaving many traces 
even to the present day, in French names like 
Mobile, Detroit, and the like, through the inter¬ 
vening country. The situation at the commence¬ 
ment of the eighteenth century was remarkably 
similar to that of the Gold Coast in Africa at the 
end of the nineteenth. The French persistently 
attempted to encroach upon the English sphere 
of influence, and it was in attempting to define 


136 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

the two spheres that George Washington learned 
ihis first lesson in diplomacy and strategy. The 
French and English American colonies were al¬ 
most perpetually at war with one another, the 
•objective being the spot where Pittsburg now 
stands, which was regarded as the gate of the 
west, overlooking as it did the valley of the Ohio. 
Here Duquesne founded the fort named after 
himself, and it was not till 1758 that this was 
finally wrested from French hands; while, in the 
following year, Wolfe, by his capture of Quebec, 
overthrew the whole French power in North 
America. Throughout the long fight the English 
had been much assisted by the guerilla warfare 
■of the Iroquois against the French. 

By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 the whole of 
French America was ceded to England, which 
also obtained possession of Florida from Spain, in 
•exchange for the Philippines, captured during the 
war. As a compensation all the country west of 
the Mississippi became joined on to the Spanish 
possessions in Mexico. These of course became 
nominally French when Napoleon’s brother Jo¬ 
seph was placed on the Spanish throne, but 
Napoleon sold them to the United States in 1803, 
so that no barrier existed to the westward spread 
of the States. Long previously to this, a Char¬ 
tered Company had been formed in 1670, with 
Prince Rupert at its head, to trade with the In¬ 
dians for furs in Hudson’s Bay, then and for some 
time afterwards called Rupertsland. The Hudson 
Bay Company gradually extended its knowledge 
•of the northerly parts of America towards the 
Rocky Mountains, but it was not till 1740 that 
Varenne de la Varanderye discovered their ex¬ 
tent. In 1769-71 a fur trader named Hearne 


THE PARTITION OF AMERICA. 


137 


traced the river Coppermine to the sea, while it 
was not till 1793 that Mr. (after Sir A.) Mac¬ 
kenzie discovered the river now named after him,, 
and crossed the continent of North America from 
Atlantic to Pacific. One of the reasons for this 
late exploration of the north-west of North 
America was a geographical myth started by a 
Spanish voyager named Juan de Fuca as early as 
1592. Coasting as far as Vancouver Island, he 
entered the inlet to the south of it, and not being 
able to see land to the north, brought back a 
report of a huge sea spreading over all that part 
of the country, which most geographers assumed 
to pass over into Hudson Bay or the neighbour¬ 
hood. It was this report as much as anything 
which encouraged hopes of finding the north-west 
passage in a latitude low enough to be free from 
ice. 

As soon as the United States got possession 
of the land west of the Mississippi they began to 
explore it, and between 1804 and 1807 Lewis and! 
Clarke had explored the whole basin of the Mis¬ 
souri, while Pike had investigated the country 
between the sources of the Mississippi and the 
Red River. We have already seen that Bering 
had carried over Russian investigation and 
dominion into Alaska, and it was in order to 
avoid her encroachments down towards the 
Californian coast that President Monroe put forth 
in 1823 the doctrine that no further colonisation 
of the Americas would be permitted by the United 
States. In this year Russia agreed to limit her 
claims to the country north of 54.40°. The States 
subsequently acquired California and other ad¬ 
joining states during their war with Mexico in 
1848, just before gold was discovered in the 


138 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Sacramento valley. The land between California 
and Alaska was held in joint possession between 
Great Britain and the States, and was known as 
the Oregon Territory. Lewis and Clarke had 
explored the Columbia River, while Vancouver 
had much earlier examined the island which now 
bears his name, so that both countries appear to 
have some rights of discovery to the district. At 
•one time the inhabitants of the States were 
inclined to claim all the country as far as the 
Russian boundary 54.40°, and a war-cry arose 
“54.40° or fight; ” but in 1846 the territory was 
divided by the 49th parallel, and at this date we 
may say the partition of America was complete, 
and all that remained to be known of it was the 
ice-bound northern coast, over which so much 
heroic enterprise has been displayed. 

The history of geographical discovery in 
America is thus in large measure a history of con¬ 
quest. Men got to know both coast-line and 
interior while endeavouring either to trade or to 
settle where nature was propitious, or the country 
afforded mineral or vegetable wealth that could be 
easily transported. Of the coast early knowledge 
was acquired for geography ; but where the conti¬ 
nent broadens out either north or south, making 
the interior inaccessible for trade purposes with 
the coasts, ignorance remained even down to the 
nineteenth century. Even to the present day the 
country south of the valley of the Amazon is 
perhaps as little known as any portion of the 
earth’s surface, while, as we have seen, it was not 
till the early years of the nineteenth century that 
any knowledge was acquired of the huge tract of 
country between the Mississippi and the Rock) 
Mountains. It was the natural expansion of the 


AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 139 

United States, rendered possible by the cession 
of this tract to the States by Napoleon in 1803, 
that brought it within the knowledge of all. That 
expansion was chiefly due to the improved 
methods of communication which steam has 
given to mankind only within this century. But 
for this the region east of the Rocky Mountains 
would possibly be as little known to Europeans, 
even at the present day, as the Soudan or Somali¬ 
land. It is owing to this natural expansion of 
the States, and in minor measure of Canada, that 
few great names of geographical explorers are 
connected with our knowledge of the interior of 
North America. Unknown settlers have been the 
pioneers of geography, and not as elsewhere has 
the reverse been the case. In the two other con¬ 
tinents whose geographical history we have still 
to trace, Australia and Africa, explorers have 
preceded settlers or conquerors, and we can gen¬ 
erally follow the course of geographical discovery 
in their case without the necessity of discussing 
their political history. 

[Authorities : Winsor, From Cartier to Frontenac ; Gelcich, 
in Mittheilungen of Geographical Society of Vienna, 1892.] 


CHAPTER X. 

AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS-TASMAN 

AND COOK. 

If one looks at the west coast of Australia one 
is struck by the large number of Dutch names 
Which are jotted down the coast. There are Hoog 


140 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Island, Diemen’s Bay, Houtman’s Abrolhos, De 
Wit land, and the Archipelago of Nuyts, besides 
Dirk Hartog’s Island and Cape Leeuwin. To the 
extreme north we find the Gulf of Carpentaria, 
and to the extreme south the island which used 
to be called Van Diemen’s Land. It is not alto¬ 
gether to be wondered at that almost to the 
middle of this century the land we now call 
Australia was tolerably well known as New Hol¬ 



land. If the Dutch had struck the more fertile 
eastern shores of the Australian continent, it 
might have been called with reason New Holland 
to the present day; but there is scarcely any long 
coast-line cf the world so inhospitable and so 
little promising as that of Western Australia, and 
one can easily understand how the Dutch, though 
they explored it, did not care to take possession 
of it. 

But though the Dutch were the first to explore 








AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 141 

any considerable stretch of Australian coast, they 
were by no means the first to sight it. As early 
as 1542 a Spanish expedition, under Luis Lopez 
de Villalobos, was despatched to follow up the 
discoveries of Magellan in the Pacific Ocean with¬ 
in the Spanish sphere of influence. He discovered 
several of the islands of Polynesia, and attempted 
to seize the Philippines, but his fleet had to return 
to New Spain. One of the ships coasted along 
an island to which was given the name of New 
Guinea, and was thought to be part of the great 
unknown southern land which Ptolemy had im¬ 
agined to exist in the south of the Indian Ocean, 
and to be connected in some way with Tierra del 
Fuego. Curiosity was thus aroused, and in 1606 
Pedro de Quiros was despatched on a voyage to 
the South Seas with three ships. He discovered 
the New Hebrides, and believed it formed part of 
the southern continent, and he therefore named 
it Australia del Espiritu Santo, and hastened home 
to obtain the viceroyalty of this new possession. 
One of his ships got separated from him, and the 
commander, Luys Naz de Torres, sailed farther 
to the south-west, and thereby learned that the 
New Australia was not a continent but an island. 
He proceeded farther till he came to New Guinea, 
which he coasted along the south coast, and seeing 
land to the south of him, he thus passed through 
the straits since named after him, and was prob¬ 
ably the first European to see the continent of 
Australia. In the very same year (1606) the 
Dutch yacht named the Duyfken is said to have 
coasted along the south and west coast of New 
Guinea nearly a thousand miles, till they reached 
Cape Keerweer, or “ turn again.” This was prob¬ 
ably the north-west coast of Australia. In the 


142 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

first thirty years of the seventeenth century the 
Dutch followed the west coast of Australia with 
as much industry as the Portuguese had done with 
the west coast of Africa, leaving up to the present 
day signs of their explorations in the names of 
islands, bays, and capes. Dirk Hartog, in the 
Endraaght, discovered that Land which is named 
after his ship, and the cape and roadstead named 
after himself, in 1616. Jan Edels left his name 
upon the western coast in 1619 ; while, three years 
later, a ship named the Lioness or Leeuwin reached 
the most western point of the continent, to which 
its name is still attached. Five years later, in 
1627, De Nuyts coasted round the south coast of 
Australia; while in the same year a Dutch com¬ 
mander named Carpenter discovered and gave his 
name to the immense indentation still known as 
the Gulf of Carpentaria. 

But still more important discoveries were made 
in 1642 by an expedition sent out from Batavia 
under Abel Janssen Tasman to investigate the 
real extent of the southern land. After the voy¬ 
ages of the Leeuiuin and De Nuyts it was seen 
that the southern coast of the new land trended 
to the east, instead of working round to the west, 
as would have been the case if Ptolemy’s views 
had been correct. Tasman’s problem was to dis¬ 
cover whether it was connected with the great 
southern land assumed to lie to the south of South 
America. Tasman first sailed from Mauritius, 
and then directing his course to the south-east, 
going much more south than Cape Leeuwin, at 
last reached land in latitude 43.30° and longitude 
163.50°. This he called Van Diemen’s Land, 
after the name of the Governor-General of Bata¬ 
via, and it was assumed that this joined on to the 


AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 143 

land already discovered by De Nuyts. Sailing 
farther to the eastward, Tasman came out into 
the open sea again, and thus appeared to prove 
that the newly discovered land was not connected 
with the great unknown continent round the south 
pole. 

But he soon came across land which might 
possibly answer to that description, and he called 
it Staaten Land, in honour of the States-General 
of the Netherlands. This was undoubtedly some 
part of New Zealand. Still steering eastward, 
but with a more northerly trend, Tasman dis¬ 
covered several islands in the Pacific, and ulti¬ 
mately reached Batavia after touching on New 
Guinea. His discoveries were a great advance on 
previous knowledge; he had at any rate reduced 
the possible dimensions of the unknown continent 
of the south within narrow limits, and his discov¬ 
eries were justly inscribed upon the map of the 
world cut in stone upon the new Staathaus in 
Amsterdam, in which the name New Holland was 
given by order of the States-General to the west¬ 
ern part of the “ terra Australis.” When England 
for a time became joined on to Holland under 
the rule of William III., William Dampier was de¬ 
spatched to New Holland to make further discov¬ 
eries. He retraced the explorations of the Dutch 
from Dirk Hartog’s Bay to New Guinea, and ap¬ 
pears to have been the first European to have 
noticed the habits of the kangaroo ; otherwise his 
voyage did not add much to geographical knowl¬ 
edge, though when he left the coasts of New Gui¬ 
nea he steered between New England and New 
Ireland. 

As a result of these Dutch voyages the exist¬ 
ence of a great land somewhere to the south-east 


144 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

of Asia became common property to all civilised 
men. As an instance of this familiarity many 
years before Cook’s epoch-making voyages, it 
may be mentioned that in 1699 Captain Lemuel 
Gulliver (in Swift’s celebrated romance) arrived 
at the kingdom of Lilliput by steering north-west 
from Van Diemen’s Land, which he mentions by 
name. Lilliput, it would thus appear, was situated 
somewhere in the neighbourhood of the great 
Bight of Australia. This curious mixture of 
definite knowledge and vague ignorance on the 
part of Swift exactly corresponds to the state of 
geographical knowledge about Australia in his 
days, as is shown in the preceding map of those 
parts of the world, as given by the great French 
cartographer D’Anville in 1746 (p. 140). 

These discoveries of the Spanish and Dutch 
were direct results and corollaries of the great 
search for the Spice Islands, which has formed 
the main subject of our inquiries. The discover¬ 
ies were mostly made by ships fitted out in the 
Malay archipelago, if not from the Spice Islands 
themselves. But at the beginning of the eight¬ 
eenth century new motives came into play in the 
search for new lands; by that time almost the 
whole coast-line of the world was roughly known. 
The Portuguese had coasted Africa, the Spanish 
South America, the English most of the east of 
North America, while Central America was known 
through the Spaniards. Many of the islands of 
the Pacific Ocean had been touched upon, though 
not accurately surveyed, and there remained only 
the north-west coast of America and the north¬ 
east coast of Asia to be explored, while the great 
remaining problem of geography was to discov¬ 
er if the great southern continent assumed by 


AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 145 

Ptolemy existed, and, if so, what were its dimen¬ 
sions. It happened that all these problems of 
coast-line geography, if we may so call it, were 
destined to be solved by one man, an English¬ 
man named James Cook, who, with Prince Henry, 
Magellan, and Tasman, may be said to have de¬ 
termined the limits of the habitable land. 

His voyages were made in the interests, not 
of trade or conquest, but of scientific curiosity ; 
and they were, appropriately enough, begun in the 
interests of quite a different science than that of 
geography. The English astronomer Halley had 
left as a sort of legacy the task of examining the 
transit of Venus, which he predicted for the year 
1769, pointing out its paramount importance for 
determining the distance of the sun from the earth. 
This transit could only be observed in the south¬ 
ern hemisphere, and it was in order to observe it 
that Cook made his first voyage of exploration. 

There was a double suitability in the motive 
of Cook’s first voyage. The work of his life 
could only have been carried out owing to the 
improvement in nautical instruments which had 
been made during the early part of the eignteenth 
century. Hadley had invented the sextant, 031 
which the sun’s elevation could be taken with 
much more ease and accuracy than with the old 
cross-staff, the very rough gnomon which the 
earlier navigators had to use. Still more impor¬ 
tant for scientific geography was the improvement 
that had taken place in accurate chronometry. 
To find the latitude of a place is not so difficult— 
the length of the day at different times of the 
year will by itself be almost enough to determine 
this, as we'have seen in the very earliest history 
of Greek geography—but to determine the longi* 
10 


146 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

tude was a much more difficult task, which in the 
earlier stages could only be performed by guess¬ 
work and dead reckoning. 

But when clocks had been brought to such a 
pitch of accuracy that they would not lose but a 
few seconds or minutes during the whole voyage, 
they could be used to determine the difference of 
local time between any spot on the earth’s sur¬ 
face and that of the port from which the ship 
sailed, or from some fixed place where the clock 
could be timed. The English government, seeing 
the importance of this, proposed the very large 
reward of ^10,000 for the invention of a chronom¬ 
eter which would not lose more than a stated 
number of minutes during a year. This prize was 
won by John Harrison, and from this time onward 
a sea-captain with a minimum of astronomical 
knowledge was enabled to know his longitude 
within a few minutes. Hadley’s sextant and 
Harrison’s chronometer were the necessary im¬ 
plements to enable James Cook to do his work, 
which was thus, both in aim and method, in every 
way English. 

James Cook was a practical sailor, who had 
shown considerable intelligence in sounding the 
St. Lawrence on Wolfe’s expedition, and had after¬ 
wards been appointed marine surveyor of New¬ 
foundland. When the Royal Society determined 
to send out an expedition to observe the transit 
of Venus, according to Halley’s prediction, they 
were deterred from entrusting the expedition to a 
scientific man by the example of Halley himself, 
who had failed to obtain obedience from sailors on 
being entrusted with the command. Dalrymple, 
the chief hydrographer of the Admiralty, who had 
chief claims to the command, was also somewhat 


AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 147 

of a faddist, and Cook was selected almost as a 
dernier ressort. The choice proved an excellent 
one. He selected a coasting coaler named the 
Endeavour , of 360 tons, because her breadth of 
beam would enable her to carry more stores and 
to run near coasts. Just before they started, 
Captain Wallis returned from a voyage round the 
world upon which he had discovered or re-discov¬ 
ered Tahiti, and he recommended this as a suit¬ 
able place for observing the transit. 

Cook duly arrived there, and on the 3rd of 
June, 1769, the main object of the expedition was 
fulfilled by a successful observation. But he 
then proceeded farther, and arrived soon at a land 
which he saw reason to identify with the Staaten 
Land of Tasman; but on coasting along, this. 
Cook found that, so far from belonging to a great 
southern continent, it was composed of two islands, 
between which he sailed, giving his name to the 
strait separating them. Leaving New Zealand on 
the 31st of March, 1770, on the 20th of the next 
month he came across another land to the west¬ 
ward, hitherto unknown to mariners. Entering 
an inlet, he explored the neighbourhood with the 
aid of Mr. Joseph Banks, the naturalist of the ex¬ 
pedition. He found so many plants new to him 
that the bay was termed Botany Bay. 

He then coasted northward, and nearly lost 
his ship upon the great reef running down the 
eastern coast; but by keeping within it he man¬ 
aged to reach the extreme end of the land in this 
direction, and proved that it was distinct from 
New Guinea. In other words, he had reached 
the southern point of the strait named after Tor¬ 
res. To this immense line of coast Cook gave 
the name of New South Wales, from some resem- 


148 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

folance that he saw to the coast about Swansea. 
By this first voyage Cook had proved that neither 
New Holland nor Staaten Land belonged to the 
great Antarctic continent, which remained the sole 
myth bequeathed by the ancients which had not 
yet been definitely removed from the maps. In 
his second voyage, starting in 1772, he was directed 
to settle finally this problem. He went at once 
to the Cape of Good Hope, and from there started 
out on a zigzag journey round the Southern Pole, 
poking the nose of his vessel in all directions as 
far south as he could reach, only pulling up when 
he touched ice. In whatever direction he ad¬ 
vanced he failed to find any trace of extensive 
land corresponding to the supposed Antarctic 
continent, which he thus definitely proved to be 
non-existent. He spent the remainder of this 
voyage in re-discovering various sets of archipela¬ 
gos which preceding Spanish, Dutch, and English 
navigators had touched, but had never accurately 
surveyed. Later on Cook made a run across the 
Pacific from New Zealand to Cape Horn without 
discovering any extensive land, thus clinching the 
matter after three years’ careful inquiry. It is 
worthy of remark that during that long time he 
lost but four out of 118 men, and only one of 
them by sickness. 

Only one great problem to maritime geography 
still remained to be solved, that of the north-west 
passage, which, as we have seen, had so frequently 
been tried by English navigators, working from 
the east through Hudson’s Bay. In 1776 Cook 
was deputed by George III, to attempt the solu¬ 
tion of this problem by a new method. He was 
directed to endeavour to find an opening on the 
north-west coast of America which would lead into 


AUSTRALIA AND THE SOUTH SEAS. 


49 ' 


Hudson’s Bay. The old legend of Juan de Fu- 
ca’s great bay still misled geographers as to this- 
coast. Cook not alone settled this problem, but, 
by advancing through Bering Strait and examin¬ 
ing both sides of it, determined that the two con¬ 
tinents of Asia and America approached one an¬ 
other as near as thirty-six miles. On his return! 
voyage he landed at Owhyee (Hawaii), where he- 
was slain in 1777, and his ships returned to Eng¬ 
land without adding anything further to geo¬ 
graphical knowledge. 

Cook’s voyages had aroused the generous emu¬ 
lation of the French, who, to their eternal honour, 
had given directions to their fleet to respect his. 
vessels wherever found, though France was at. 
that time at war with England. In 1783 an ex¬ 
pedition was sent, under Francois de la Perouse,. 
to complete Cook’s work. He explored the north¬ 
east coast of Asia, examined the island of Sagha- 
lien, and passed through the strait between it and 
Japan, often called by his name. In Kamtschat- 
ka La P6rouse landed Monsieur Lesseps, who had 
accompanied the expedition as Russian inter¬ 
preter, and sent home by him his journals and 
surveys. Lesseps made a careful examination of 
Kamtschatka himself, and succeeded in passing 
overland thence to Paris, being the first European, 
to journey completely across the Old World from 
the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. La Perouse- 
then proceeded to follow Cook by examining the 
coast of New South Wales, and to his surprise, 
when entering a fine harbour in the middle of the 
coast, found there English ships engaged in set¬ 
tling the first Australian colony in 1787. After 
again delivering his surveys to be forwarded by 
the Englishmen, he started to survey the coast oC 


150 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

New Holland, but his expedition was not heard 
of until 1826, when it was discovered that it had 
been wrecked on Vanikoro, an island near the 
Fijis. 

We have seen that Cook’s exploration of the 
eastern coast of Australia was soon followed up 
by a settlement. A number of convicts were sent 
out under Captain Philips to Botany Bay, and 
from that time onward English explorers grad¬ 
ually determined with accuracy both the coast¬ 
line and the interior of the huge stretch of land 
known to us as Australia. One of the ships that 
had accompanied Cook on his second voyage had 
made a rough survey of Van Diemen’s Land, and 
had come to the conclusion that it joined on to 
the mainland. But in 1797, Bass, a surgeon in 
the navy, coasted down from Port Jackson to the 
south in a fine whale boat with a crew of six 
men, and discovered open sea running between 
the southernmost point and Van Diemen’s Land; 
this is still known as Bass’ Strait. A companion 
of his, named Flinders, coasted, in 1799, along 
the south coast from Cape Leeuwin eastward, and 
on this voyage met a French ship at Encounter 
Bay, so named from the rencontre. Proceeding 
farther, he discovered Port Philip; and the coast¬ 
line of Australia was approximately settled after 
Captain P. P. King in four voyages, between 1817 
and 1822, had investigated the river mouths. 

The interior now remained to be investigated. 
On the east coast this was rendered difficult by 
the range of the Blue Mountains, honeycombed 
throughout with huge gullies, which led investi¬ 
gators time after time into a cul-de-sac; but in 
1813 Philip Wentworth managed to cross them, 
and found a fertile plateau to the westward. 





The exploration of Australia. 













































1152 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Next year Evans discovered the Lachlan and 
Macquarie rivers, and penetrated farther into the 
Bathurst plains. In 1828-29 Captain Sturt in¬ 
creased the knowledge of the interior by tracing 
the course of the two great rivers Darling and 
Murray. In 1848 the German explorer Leich¬ 
hardt lost his life in an attempt to penetrate the 
interior northward; but in i860 two explorers, 
named Burke and Wills, managed to pass from 
■south to north along the east coast; while in the 
four years 1858 to 1862, John M‘Dowall Stuart 
performed the still more difficult feat of crossing 
the centre of the continent from south to north, 
in order to trace a course for the telegraphic line 
which was shortly afterwards erected. By this 
time settlements had sprung up throughout the 
whole coast of Eastern Australia, and there only 
remained the western desert to be explored. This 
was effected in two journeys of John Forrest, 
between 1868 and 1874, who penetrated from 
Western Australia as far as the central tele¬ 
graphic line; while, between 1872 and 1876, 
Ernest Giles performed the same feat to the 
north. Quite recently, in 1897, these two routes 
were joined by the journey of the Honourable 
Daniel Carnegie from the Coolgardie gold fields 
in the south to those of Kimberley in the north. 
These explorations, while adding to our knowl¬ 
edge of the interior of Australia, have only con¬ 
firmed the impression that it was not worth 
knowing. 

[A uthorities : Rev. G. Grimm, Discovery and Exploration 
of Australia (Melbourne, 1888); A. F. Calvert, Discovery of 
Australia , 1893 ; Exploration of Australia, 1895 ; Early Voy¬ 
ages to Australia , Hakluyt Society.] 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 153 


CHAPTER XI. 

EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA : 

PARK-LIVINGSTONE—STANLEY. 

We have seen how the Portuguese had slowly 
coasted along the shore of Africa during the 
fifteenth century in search of a way to the 
Indies. By the end of the century mariners’ 
portulanos gave a rude yet effective account 
of the littoral of Africa, both on the west and 
the eastern side. Not alone did they explore 
the coast, but they settled upon it. At Amina 
on the Guinea coast, at Loando near the Congo, 
and at Benguela on the western coast, they 
established stations whence to despatch the 
gold and ivory, and, above all, the slaves, which 
turned out to be the chief African products of 
use to Europeans. On the east coast they 
settled at Sofala, a port of Mozambique; and in 
Zanzibar they possessed no less than three ports, 
those first visited by Vasco da Gama and after¬ 
wards celebrated by Milton in the sonorous line 
contained in the gorgeous geographical excursus 
in the Eleventh Book— 

“ Mombaza and Quiloa and Melind.” 

—Paradise Lost , xi. 339. 

It is probable that, besides settling on the 
coast, the Portuguese from time to time made ex¬ 
ploration into the interior. At any rate, in some 
maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
there is shown a remarkable knowledge of the 
course of the Nile. We get it terminated in three 
large lakes, which can be scarcely other than the 


154 THE story of geographical discovery. 

Victoria and Albert Nyanza, and Tanganyika. 
The Mountains of the Moon also figure promi¬ 
nently, and it was only almost the other day that 
Mr. Stanley re-discovered them. It is difficult, 
however, to determine how far these entries on 
the Portuguese maps were due to actual knowl¬ 
edge or report, or to the traditions of a still earlier 
knowledge of these lakes and mountains; for in 
the maps accompanying the early editions of 
Ptolemy we likewise obtain the same information, 
which is repeated by the Arabic geographers, ob¬ 
viously from Ptolemy, and not from actual obser¬ 
vation. When the two great French carto¬ 
graphers Delisle and D’Anville determined not to 
insert anything on their maps for which they had 
not some evidence, these lakes and mountains 
disappeared, and thus it has come about that 
maps of the seventeenth century often appear to 
display more knowledge of the interior of Africa 
than those of the beginning of the nineteenth, at 
least with regard to the sources of the Nile. 

African exploration of the interior begins with 
the search for the sources of the Nile, and has 
been mainly concluded by the determination of 
the course of the three other great rivers, the 
Niger, the Zambesi, and the Congo. It is re¬ 
markable that all four rivers have had their 
course determined by persons of British nation¬ 
ality. The names of Bruce and Grant will always 
be associated with the Nile, that of Mungo Park 
with the Niger, Dr. Livingstone with the Zam¬ 
besi, and Mr. Stanley with the Congo. It is not 
inappropriate that, except in the case of the 
Congo, England should control the course of the 
rivers which her sons first made accessible to 
civilisation. 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 155 

We have seen that there was an ancient tradi¬ 
tion reported by Herodotus, that the Nile trended 
off to the west and became there the river Niger ; 
while still earlier there was an impression that 
part of it at any rate wandered eastward, and 
some way joined on to the same source as the 



Dapper’s map of Africa, 1676. 


Tigris and Euphrates—at least that seems to be 
the suggestion in the biblical account of Paradise. 
Whatever the reason, the greatest uncertainty 
existed as to the actual course of the river, and to 
discover the source of the Nile was for many 
centuries the standing expression for performing 






156 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

the impossible. In 1768, James Bruce, a Scottish 
gentleman of position, set out with the determi¬ 
nation of solving this mystery—a determination 
which he had made in early youth, and carried 
out with characteristic pertinacity. He had 
acquired a certain amount of knowledge of 
Arabic and acquaintance with African customs as 
Consul at Algiers. He went up the Nile as far as 
Farsunt, and then crossed the desert to the Red 
Sea, went over to Jedda, from which he took ship 
for Massowah, and began his search for the 
sources of the Nile in Abyssinia. He visited the 
ruins of Axum, the former capital, and in the 
neighbourhood of that place saw the incident 
with which his travels have always been associ¬ 
ated, in which a couple of rump-steaks were ex¬ 
tracted from a cow while alive, the wound sewn 
up, and the animal driven on farther. 

Here, guided by some Gallas, he worked his 
way up the Blue Nile to the three fountains, 
which he declared to be the true sources of the 
Nile, and identified with the three mysterious 
lakes in the old maps. From there he worked 
his way down the Nile, reaching Cairo in 1773. 
Of course what he had discovered was merely the 
source of the Blue Nile, and even this had been 
previously visited by a Portuguese traveller 
named Payz. But the interesting adventures 
which he experienced, and the interesting style 
in which he told them, aroused universal atten¬ 
tion, which was perhaps increased by the fact 
that his journey was undertaken purely from love 
of adventure and discovery. The year 1768 is 
distinguished by the two journeys of James Cook 
and James Bruce, both of them expressly for pur¬ 
poses of geographical discovery, and thus inau- 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 157 

gurating the era of what may be called scientific 
exploration. Ten years later an association was 
formed named the African Association, expressly 
intended to explore the unknown parts of Africa, 
and the first geographical society called into 
existence. In 1795 Mungo Park was despatched 
by the Association to the west coast. He started 
from the Gambia, and after many adventures, in 
which he was captured by the Moors, arrived at 
the banks of the Niger, which he traced along its 
middle course, but he failed to reach as far as 
Timbuctoo. He made a second attempt in 1805, 
hoping by sailing down the Niger to prove its 
identity with the river known at its mouth as the 
Congo ; but he was forced to return, and died at 
Boussa, without having determined the remaining 
course of the Niger. 

Attention was thus drawn to the existence of 
the mysterious city of Timbuctoo, of which 
Mungo Park had brought back curious rumors 
on his return from his first journey. This was 
visited in 1811 by a British seaman named Adams, 
who had been wrecked on the Moorish coast, and 
taken as a slave by the Moors across to Tim¬ 
buctoo. He was ultimately ransomed by the 
British consul at Mogador, and his account re¬ 
vived interest in West African exploration. 
Attempts were made to penetrate the secret of 
the Niger, both from Senegambia and from the 
Congo, but both were failures, and a fresh method 
was adopted, possibly owing to Adams’ experi¬ 
ence in the attempt to reach the Niger by the car¬ 
avan routes across the Sahara. In 1822 Major 
Denham and Lieutenant Clapperton left Murzouk, 
the capital of Fezzan, and made their way to 
Lake Chad and thence to Bornu. Clapperton, 


158 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

later on. again visited the Niger from Benin. 
Altogether these two travellers added some two 
thousand miles of route to our knowledge of 
West Africa. In 1826-27 Timbuctoo was at last 
visited by two Europeans—Major Laing in the 
former year, who was murdered there; and a 
young Frenchman, Rene Caillie, in the latter. 
His account aroused great interest, and Tenny¬ 
son began his poetic career by a prize-poem on 
the subject of the mysterious African capital. 

It was not till 1850 that the work of Denham 
and Clapperton was again taken up by Barth, 
who for five years explored the whole country to 
the west of Lake Chad, visiting Timbuctoo, and 
connecting the lines of route of Clapperton and 
Cailli6. What he did for the west of Lake Chad 
was accomplished by Nachtigall east of that lake 
in Darfur and Wadai, in a journey which likewise 
took five years (1869-74). Of recent years polit¬ 
ical interests have caused numerous expeditions, 
especially by the French to connect their posses¬ 
sions in Algeria and Tunis with those on the Gold 
Coast and on the Senegal. 

The next stage in African exploration is con¬ 
nected with the name of the man to whom can be 
traced practically the whole of recent discoveries. 
By his tact in dealing with the natives, by his 
calm pertinacity and dauntless courage, David 
Livingstone succeeded in opening up the entirely 
unknown districts of Central Africa. Starting 
from the Cape in 1849, he worked his way north¬ 
ward to the Zambesi, and then to Lake Dilolo, 
and after five years’ wandering reached the west¬ 
ern coast of Africa at Loanda. Then retracing 
his steps to the Zambesi again, he followed its 
course to its mouth on the east coast, thus for 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 159 

the first time crossing Africa from west to east. 
In a second journey, on which he started in 1858, 
he commenced tracing the course of the river 
Shire, the most important affluent of the Zambesi, 
and in so doing arrived on the shores of Lake 
Nyassa in September, 1859. 

Meanwhile two explorers, Captain (afterwards 
Sir Richard) Burton and Captain Speke, had 
started from Zanzibar to discover a lake of which 
rumours had for a long time been heard, and in 
the following year succeeded in reaching Lake 
Tanganyika. On their return Speke parted from 
Burton and took a route more to the north, from 
which he saw another great lake, which afterwards 
turned out to be the Victoria Nyanza. In i860, 
with another companion (Captain Grant), Speke 
returned to the Victoria Nyanza, and traced out 
its course. On the north of it they found a great 
river trending to the north, which they followed 
as far as Gondokoro. Here they found Mr. 
(afterwards Sir Samuel) Baker, who had travelled 
up the White Nile to investigate its source, which 
they thus proved to be in the Lake Victoria 
Nyanza. Baker continued his search, and suc¬ 
ceeded in showing that another source of the Nile 
was to be found in a smaller lake to the west, 
which he named Albert Nyanza. Thus these 
three Englishmen had combined to solve the long- 
sought problem of the sources of the Nile. 

The discoveries of the Englishmen were soon 
followed up by important political action by the 
Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, who claimed the 
whole course of the Nile as part of his dominions, 
and established stations all along it. This, of 
course, led to full information about the basin of 
the Nile being acquired for geographical pur- 


t 6o THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

poses, and, under Sir Samuel Baker and Colonel 
Gordon, civilisation was for a time in possession 
of the Nile from its source to its mouth. 

Meanwhile Livingstone had set himself to 
solve the problem of the great Lake Tanganyika, 
and started on his last journey in 1865 for that 
purpose. He discovered Lakes Moeroand Bang- 
weolo, and the river Nyangoue, also known as 
Lualaba. So much interest had been aroused 
by Livingstone’s previous exploits of discovery, 
that when nothing had been heard of him for 
some time, in 1869 Mr. H. M. Stanley was sent 
by the proprietors of the New York Herald, for 
whom he had previously acted as war-correspond¬ 
ent, to find Livingstone. He started in 1871 
from Zanzibar, and before the end of the year 
had come across a white man in the heart of the 
Dark Continent, and greeted him with the historic 
query, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Two 
years later Livingstone died, a martyr to geo¬ 
graphical and missionary enthusiasm. His work 
was taken up by Mr. Stanley, who in 1876 was 
again despatched to continue Livingstone’s work, 
and succeeded in crossing the Dark Continent 
from Zanzibar to the mouth of the Congo, the 
whole course of which he traced, proving that the 
Lualaba or Nyangoue were merely different 
names or affluents of this mighty stream. Stan¬ 
ley’s remarkable journey completed the rough 
outline of African geography by defining the 
course of the fourth great river of the continent. 

But Stanley’s journey across the Dark Con¬ 
tinent was destined to be the starting-point of an 
entirely new development of the African problem. 
Even while Stanley w r as on his journey a confer¬ 
ence had been assembled at Brussels by King 



II 


Exploration and partition of Africa, 



































































162 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Leopold, in which an international committee was 
formed representing all the nations of Europe, 
nominally for the exploration of Africa, but, as it 
turned out, really for its partition among the 
European powers. Within fifteen years of the 
assembly of the conference the interior of Africa 
had been parcelled out, mainly among the five 
powers, England, France, Germany, Portugal, and 
Belgium. As in the case of America, geographical 
discovery was soon followed by political division. 

The process began by the carving out of a 
state covering the whole of the newly-discovered 
Congo, nominally independent, but really forming 
a colony of Belgium, King Leopold supplying the 
funds for that purpose. Mr. Stanley was de¬ 
spatched in 1879 to establish stations along the 
lower course of the river, but, to his surprise, he 
found that he had been anticipated by M. de 
Brazza, a Portuguese in the service of France, 
who had been despatched on a secret mission to 
anticipate the King of the Belgians in seizing the 
important river mouth. At the same time Portu¬ 
gal put in claims for possession of the Congo 
mouth, and it became clear that international rival¬ 
ries would interfere with the foundation of any 
state on the Congo unless some definite interna¬ 
tional arrangement was arrived at. Almost about 
the same time, in 1880, Germany began to enter 
the field as a colonising power in Africa. In 
South-West Africa and in the Cameroons, and 
somewhat later in Zanzibar, claims were set up 
on behalf of Germany by Prince Bismarck which 
conflicted with English interests in those districts, 
and under his presidency a Congress was held at 
Berlin in the winter of 1884-85 to determine the 
rules of the claims by which Africa could be par- 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 163 

titioned. The old historic claims of Portugal to 
the coast of Africa, on which she had established 
stations both on the west and eastern side, were 
swept away by the principle that only effective 
occupation could furnish a claim of sovereignty. 
This great principle will rule henceforth the whole 
course of African history; in other words, the 
good old Border rule— 

“ That they should take who have the power, 

And they should keep who can.” 

Almost immediately after the sitting of the 
Berlin Congress, and indeed during it, arrange¬ 
ments were come to by which the respective claims 
of England and Germany in South-West Africa 
were definitely determined. Almost immediately 
afterwards a similar process had to be gone 
through in order to determine the limits of the 
respective “ spheres of influence,” as they began 
to be called, of Germany and England in East 
Africa. A Chartered Company, called the British 
East Africa Association, was to administer the 
land north of Victoria Nyanza bounded on the 
west by the Congo Free State, while to the north 
it extended till it touched the revolted provinces 
of Egypt, of which we shall soon speak. In South 
Africa a similar Chartered Company, under the 
influence of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, practically con¬ 
trolled the whole country from Cape Colony up 
to German East Africa and the Congo Free State. 

The winter of 1890-91 was especially produc¬ 
tive of agreements of demarcation. After a con¬ 
siderable amount of friction owing to the en¬ 
croachments of Major Serpa Pinto, the limits of 
Portuguese Angola on the west coast were then 
determined, being bounded on the east by the 


f 


164 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

•Congo Free State and British Central Africa ; and 
at the same time Portuguese East Africa was set¬ 
tled in its relation both to British Central Africa 
■on the west and German East Africa on the north. 
Meanwhile Italy had put in its cairns for a share 
in the spoil, and the eastern horn of Africa, to¬ 
gether with Abyssinia, fell to its share, though it 
soon had to drop it, owing to the unexpected 
vitality shown by the Abyssinians. In the same 
year (1890) agreements between Germany and 
England settled the line of demarcation between 
the Cameroons and Togoland, with the adjoining 
British territories; while in August of the same 
year an attempt was made to limit the abnormal 
pretensions of the French along the Niger, and as 
far as Lake Chad. Here the British interests 
were represented by another Chartered Company, 
the Royal Niger Company. Unfortunately the 
delimitation was not very definite, not being by 
river courses or meridians as in other cases, but 
merely by territories ruled over by native chiefs, 
whose boundaries were not then particularly dis¬ 
tinct. This has led to considerable friction, last¬ 
ing even up to the present day; and it is only 
with reference to the demarcation between Eng¬ 
land and France in Africa that any doubt still 
remains with regard to the western and central 
portions of the continent. 

Towards the north-east the problem of delim¬ 
itation had been complicated by political events, 
which ultimately led to another great exploring 
expedition by Mr. Stanley. The extension of 
Egypt into the Equatorial Provinces under Ismail 
Pasha, due in large measure to the geographical 
discoveries of Grant, Speke, and Baker, led to an 
•enormous accumulation of debt, which caused the 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AFRICA. 165 

country to become bankrupt, Ismail Pasha to be 
deposed, and Egypt to be administered jointly by 
France and England on behalf of the European: 
bondholders. This caused much dissatisfaction 
on the part of the Egyptian officials and army 
officers, who were displaced by French and Eng¬ 
lish officials; and a rebellion broke out under 
Arabi Pasha. This led to the armed intervention 
of England, France having refused to co-operate, 
and Egypt was occupied by British troops. The 
Soudan and Equatorial Provinces had independ¬ 
ently revolted under Mohammedan fanaticism,, 
and it was determined to relinquish those Egyp¬ 
tian possessions, which had originally led to bank¬ 
ruptcy. General Gordon was despatched to relieve 
the various Egyptian garrisons in the south, but 
being without support, ultimately failed, and was 
killed in 1885. One of Gordon’s lieutenants, a 
German named Schnitzler, who appears to have 
adopted Mohammedanism, and was known as 
Emin Pasha, was thus isolated in the midst of 
Africa, near the Albert Nyanza, and Mr. Stanley 
was commissioned to attempt his rescue in 1887. 
He started to march through the Congo State, 
and succeeded in traversing a huge tract of forest 
country inhabited by diminutive savages, who- 
probably represented the Pigmies of the ancients. 
He succeeded in reaching Emin Pasha, and after 
much persuasion induced him to accompany him 
to Zanzibar, only, however, to return as a German 
agent to the Albert Nyanza. Mr. Stanley’s jour¬ 
ney on this occasion was not without its political 
aspects, since he made arrangements during the 
eastern part of his journey for securing British in¬ 
fluence for the lands afterwards handed over to 
the British East Africa Company. 


166 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

All these political delimitations were naturally 
accompanied by explorations, partly scientific, 
but mainly political. Major Serpa Pinto twice 
crossed Africa in an attempt to connect the Por¬ 
tuguese settlements on the two coasts. Similarly, 
Lieutenant Wissmann also crossed Africa twice, 
between 1881 and 1887, in the interests of the 
Congo State, though he ultimately became an 
official of his native country, Germany. Captain 
Lugard had investigated the region between the 
three Lakes Nyanza, and secured it for Great 
Britain. In South Africa British claims were 
successfully and successively advanced to Bech- 
uana-land, Mashona-land, and Matabele-land, and, 
under the leadership of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, a rail¬ 
way and telegraph were rapidly pushed forward 
towards the north. Owing to the enterprise of 
Mr. (now Sir H. H.) Johnstone, the British pos¬ 
sessions were in 1891 pushed up as far as Nyassa- 
land. By that date, as we have seen, various 
treaties with Germany and Portugal had definitely 
fixed the contour lines of the different possessions 
of the three countries in South Africa. By 1891 
the interior of Africa, which had up to 1880 been 
practically a blank, could be mapped out almost 
with as much accuracy as, at any rate, South 
America. Europe had taken possession of Africa. 

One of the chief results of this, and formerly 
one of its main motives, was the abolition of the 
slave trade. North Africa has been Mohammedan 
since the eighth century, and Islam has always 
recognised slavery, consequently the Arabs of the 
north have continued to make raids upon the 
negroes of Central Africa, to supply the Moham¬ 
medan countries of West Asia and North Africa 
with slaves. The Mahdist rebellion was in par 


EXPLORATION AND PARTITION OF AbRICA. 167 

at least a reaction against the abolition of slavery 
by Egypt, and the interest of the next few years 
will consist in the last stand of the slave mer¬ 
chant in the Soudan, in Darfur, and in Wadai, 
east of Lake Chad, where the only powerful 
independent Mohammedan Sultanate still exists. 
England is closely pressing upon the revolted 
provinces, along the upper course of the Nile; 
while France is attempting, by expeditions from 
the French Congo and through Abyssinia, to take 
possession of the Upper Nile before England 
conquers it. The race for the Upper Nile is at 
present one of the sources of danger of European 
war. 

While exploration and conquest have either 
gone hand in hand, or succeeded one another 
very closely, there has been a third motive that 
has often led to interesting discoveries, to be fol¬ 
lowed by annexation. The mighty hunters of 
Africa have often brought back, not alone ivory 
and skins, but also interesting information of the 
interior. The gorgeous narratives of Gordon 
Cumming in the “ fifties ” were one of the causes 
which led to an interest in African exploration. 
Many a lad has had his imagination fired and his 
career determined by the exploits of Gordon 
Cumming, which are now, however, almost for¬ 
gotten. Mr. F. C. Selous has in our time sur¬ 
passed even Gordon Cumming’s exploits, and has 
besides done excellent work as guide for the suc¬ 
cessive expeditions into South Africa. 

Thus, practically within our own time, the 
interior of Africa, where once geographers, as the 
poet Butler puts it, “ placed elephants instead of 
towns,” has become known, in its main outlines, 
by successive series of intrepid explorers, who 


l68 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

have often had to be warriors as well as scientific 
men. Whatever the motives that have led the 
white man into the centre of the Dark Continent 
—love of adventure, scientific curiosity, big game, 
or patriotism—the result has been that the con¬ 
tinent has become known instead of merely its 
coast-line. On the whole, English exploration has 
been the main means by which our knowledge of 
the interior of Africa has been obtained, and Eng¬ 
land has been richly rewarded by coming into pos¬ 
session of the most promising parts of the conti¬ 
nent—the Nile valley and temperate South Africa. 
But France has also gained a huge extent of 
country covering almost the whole of North-West 
Africa. While much of this is merely desert, 
there are caravan routes which tap the basin of 
the Niger and conduct its products to Algeria, 
•conquered by France early in the century, and to 
Tunis, more recently appropriated. The West 
African provinces of France have, at any rate, 
this advantage, that they are nearer to the 
mother-country than any other colony of a 
European power; and the result may be that 
African soldiers may one of these days fight for 
France on European soil, just as the Indian 
soldiers were imported to Cyprus by Lord Bea- 
consfield in 1876. Meanwhile, the result of all 
this international ambition has been that Africa 
in its entirety is now known and accessible to 
European civilisation. 

[Authorities : Kiepert, Beitrage zur Entdeckiingsgeschichte 
Afrikas , 1873; Brown, The Story of Africa, 4 vols., 1894; 
Scott Keltie, The Partition of Africa , 1896.] 


THE POLES. 


169* 


CHAPTER XII. 

THE POLES-FRANKLIN-ROSS-NORDENSKIOLD- 

NANSEN—PEARY-—AMUNDSEN—SCOTT. 

Almost the whole of the explorations which 
we have hitherto described or referred to had for 
their motive some practical purpose, whether to- 
reach the Spice Islands or to hunt big game. 
Even the excursions of Davis, Frobisher, Hudson, 
and Baffin in pursuit of the north-west passage, 
and of Barentz and Chancellor in search of the 
north-east passage, were really in pursuit of mer¬ 
cantile ends. It is only with James Cook that 
the era of purely scientific exploration begins,, 
though it is fair to qualify this statement by 
observing that the Russian expedition under 
Bering, already referred to, was ordered by Peter 
the Great to determine a strictly geographical 
problem, though doubtless it had its bearings on 
Russian ambitions. Bering and Cook between 
them, as we have seen, settled the problem of the. 
relations existing between the ends of the two- 
continents, Asia and America, but what remained 
still to the north of terra Jirma within the Arctic. 
Circle ? That was the problem which the nine¬ 
teenth century set itself to solve, and very nearly 
succeeded in the solution. For the Arctic Circle- 
we now possess maps that only show blanks over 
a few thousand square miles. 

This knowledge has been gained by slow' 
degrees, and by the exercise of the most heroic 
courage and endurance. It is a heroic tale, in 
which love of adventure and zeal for science have 
combated with and conquered the horrors of an 


170 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Arctic winter, the six months’ darkness in silence 
and desolation, the excessive cold, and the 
dangers of starvation. It is impossible here to 
go into any of the details which rendered the tale 
of Arctic voyages one of the most stirring in 
human history. All we are concerned with here 
is the amount of new r knowledge brought back 
by successive expeditions within the Arctic Circle. 

This region of the earth’s surface is distin¬ 
guished by a number of large islands in the east¬ 
ern hemisphere, most of which were discovered at 
an early date. We have seen how the Norsemen 
landed and settled upon Greenland as early as 
the tenth century. Burrough sighted Nova 
Zembla in 1556, in one of the voyages in search 
of the north-east passage, though the very name 
(Russian for Newfoundland) implies that it had 
previously been sighted and named by Russian 
seamen. Barentz is credited with having sighted 
Spitzbergen. The numerous islands to the north 
of Siberia became known through the Russian 
investigations of Discheneff, Bering, and their fol¬ 
lowers; while the intricate network of islands 
to the north of the continent of North America 
had been slowly worked out during the search for 
the north-west passage. It was indeed in pursuit 
of this will-of-the-wisp that most of the discov¬ 
eries in the Arctic Circle were made, and a gen¬ 
eral impetus given to Arctic exploration. 

It is with a renewed attempt after this search 
that the modern history of Arctic exploration 
begins. In 1818 two expeditions were sent under 
the influence of Sir Joseph Banks to search the 
north-west passage, and to attempt to reach the 
Pole. The former was the objective of John Ross 
in the Isabella and W. E. Parry in the Alexander 


THE POLES. 


171 

while in the Polar exploration John Franklin 
sailed in the Tre?it. Both expeditions were un¬ 
successful, though Ross and Parry confirmed 
Baffin’s discoveries. Notwithstanding this, two 
expeditions were sent two years later to attempt 
the north-west passage, one by land under 
Franklin, and the other by sea under Parry. 
Parry managed to get half-way across the top of 
North America, discovered the archipelago named 
after him, and reached 114 0 west longitude, 
thereby gaining the prize of ^5000 given by the 
British Parliament for the first seaman that sailed 
west of the noth meridian. He was brought up, 
however, by Banks Land, while the strait which, 
if he had known it, would have enabled him to 
complete the north-west passage, was at that 
time closed by ice. In two successive voyages, 
in 1822 and 1824, Parry increased the detailed 
knowledge of the coasts he had already discov¬ 
ered, but failed to reach even as far westward as 
he had done on his first voyage. This somewhat 
discouraged government attempts at exploration, 
and the next expedition, in 1829, was fitted out 
by Mr. Felix Boojh, sheriff of London, who 
despatched the paddle steamer Victory , com¬ 
manded by John Ross. He discovered the land 
known as Boothia Felix, and his nephew, James 
C. Ross, proved that it belonged to the mainland 
of America, which he coasted along by land to 
Cape Franklin, besides determining the exact 
position of the North Magnetic Pole at Cape 
Adelaide, on Boothia Felix. After passing five 
years within the Arctic Circle, Ross and his com¬ 
panions, who had been compelled to abandon the 
Victory , fell in with a whaler, which brought them 
home. 


172 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

We must now revert to Franklin, who, as we 
have seen, had been despatched by the Admiralty 
to outline the north coast of America, only two 
points of which had been determined, the em¬ 
bouchures of the Coppermine and the Mackenzie, 
discovered respectively by Hearne and Mackenzie. 
It was not till 1821 that Franklin was able to 
start out from the mouth of the Coppermine east¬ 
ward in two canoes, by which he coasted along 
till he came to the point named by him Point 
Turn-again. By that time only three days’ stores 
of pemmican remained, and it was only with the 
greatest difficulty, and by subsisting on lichens 
and scraps of roasted leather, that they managed 
to return to their base of operations at Fort 
Enterprise. Four years later, in 1825, Franklin 
set out on another exploring expedition with the 
same object, starting this time from the mouth of 
the Mackenzie river, and despatching one of his 
companions, Richardson, to connect the coast 
between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine; 
while he himself proceeded westward to meet the 
Blossom , which, under Captain Beechey, had been 
despatched to Behring Strait to bring his party 
back. Richardson was entirely successful in ex¬ 
amining the coast-line between the Mackenzie 
and the Coppermine; but Beechey, though he 
succeeded in rounding Icy Cape and tracing the 
coast as far as Point Barrow, did not come up to 
Franklin, who had only got within 160 miles at 
Return Reef. These 160 miles, as well as the 222 
miles intervening between Cape Turn-again, 
Franklin’s easternmost point by land, and Cape 
Franklin, J. C. Ross’s most westerly point, were 
afterwards filled in by T. Simpson in 1837, after 
a coasting voyage in boats of 1408 miles, which 


THE POLES. 


173 


stands as a record even to this day. Meanwhile 
the Great Fish River had been discovered and 
followed to its mouth by C. J. Back in 1833. 
During the voyage down the river, an oar broke 
while the boat was shooting a rapid, and one of 
the party commenced praying in a loud voice; 
whereupon the leader called out : “ Is this a time 
for praying ? Pull your starboard oar ! ” 

Meanw’hile, interest had been excited rather 
more towards the South Pole, and the land of 
which Cook had found traces in his search for the 
fabled Australian continent surrounding it. He 
had reached as far south as 71.10°, when he was 
brought up by the great ice barrier. In 1820-23 
Weddell visited the South Shetlands, south of 
Cape Horn, and found an active volcano, even 
amidst the extreme cold of that district. He 
reached as far south as 74 0 , but failed to come 
across land in that district. In 1839 Bellany dis¬ 
covered the islands named after him, with a vol¬ 
cano twelve thousand feet high, and another still 
active on Buckle Island. In 1839 a French ex¬ 
pedition under Dumont d’Urville again visited 
and explored the South Shetlands; while in the 
following year, Captain Wilkes, of the United 
States navy, discovered the land named after him. 
But the most remarkable discovery made in Ant¬ 
arctica was that of Sir J. C. Ross, who had been 
sent by the Admiralty in 1840 to identify the 
South Magnetic Pole, as we have seen he had dis¬ 
covered that of the north. With the two ships 
Erebus and Terror he discovered Victoria Land 
and the two active volcanoes named after his 
ships, which he found pouring forth flaming lava 
amidst the snow. In January, 1842, he reached 
farthest south, 78°. After the return of the Ross 


174 THE story of geographical discovery. 

expedition little was attempted toward the ex¬ 
ploration of the Antarctic regions for more than 
half a century. 

On the return of the Erebus and Terror from 
the South Seas the government placed these two 
vessels at the disposal of Franklin (who had been 
knighted for his previous discoveries), and on the 
26th of May, 1845, he started with one hundred 
and twenty-nine souls on board the two vessels, 
which were provisioned up to July, 1848. They 
were last seen by a whaler on the 26th July, of 
the former year waiting to pass into Lancaster 
Sound. After penetrating as far north as 77 0 , 
through Wellington Channel, Franklin was 
obliged to winter upon Beechey Island, and in the 
following year (September, 1846) his two ships 
were beset in Victoria Strait, about twelve miles 
from King William Land. Curiously enough, in 
the following year (1847) J. Rae had been de¬ 
spatched by land from Cape Repulse in Hudson’s 
Bay, and had coasted along the east coast of 
Boothia, thus connecting Ross’s and Franklin’s 
coast journeys with Hudson’s Bay. On 18th 
April, 1847, ^ ae had reached a point on Boothia 
less than 150 miles from Franklin on the other 
side of it. Less than two months later, on the 
nth June, Franklin died on the Erebus. His 
ships were only provisioned to July, 1848, and 
remained still beset throughout the whole of 1847. 
Crozier, upon whom the command devolved, left 
the ship with one hundred and five survivors to 
try and reach Back’s Fish River. They struggled 
along the west coast of King William Land, but 
failed to reach their destination ; disease, and 
even starvation, gradually lessened their numbers. 
An old Eskimo woman, who had watched the 


THE POLES, 


*75 



North polar region—western half. 







176 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

melancholy procession, afterwards told M‘Clin- 
tock they fell down and died as they walked. 

By this time considerable anxiety had been 
roused by the absence of any news from Frank¬ 
lin's party. Richardson and Rae were despatched 
by land in 1848, while two ships were sent on the 
attempt to reach Franklin through Bering Strait, 
and two others, the Investigator and the Enter¬ 
prise , under J. C. Ross, through Baffin Bay. Rae 
reached the east coast of Victoria Land, and ar¬ 
rived within fifty miles of the spot where Frank¬ 
lin’s two ships had been abandoned ; but it was 
not till his second expedition by land, which 
started in 1853, that he obtained any news. After 
wintering at Lady Pelly Bay, on the 20th April, 
1854, Rae met a young Eskimo, who told him 
that four years previously forty white men had 
been seen dragging a boat to the south on the 
west shore of King William Land, and a few 
months later the bodies of thirty of these men 
had been found by the Eskimo, who produced 
silver with the Franklin crest to confirm the 
truth of their statement. Further searches by 
land were continued up to as late as 1879, when 
Lieutenant F. Schwatka, of the United States 
army, discovered several of the graves and skel¬ 
etons of the Franklin expedition. 

Neither of the two attempts by sea from the 
Atlantic or from the Pacific base, in 1848, having 
succeeded in gaining any news, the Enterprise and 
the Investigator , which had previously attempted 
to reach Franklin from the east, were despatched 
in 1850, under Captain R. Collinson and Captain 
M‘Clure, to attempt the search from the west 
through Bering Strait. M‘Clure in the Investi¬ 
gator , did not wait for Collinson, as he had been 


THE POLES. 


177 


directed, but pushed on and discovered Banks 
Land, and became beset in the ice in Prince of 
Wales Strait. In the winter of 1850-51 he en¬ 
deavoured unsuccessfully to work his 'way from 
this strait into Parry Sound, but in August and 
September, 1851, managed to coast round Banks 
Land to its most north-westerly point, and then 
succeeded in passing through the strait named after 
M‘Clure, and reached Barrow Strait, thus perform¬ 
ing for the first time the north-west passage, 
though it was not till 1853 that the Investigator 
was abandoned. Collinson, in the Enterprise, fol¬ 
lowed M‘Clure closely, though never reaching 
him, and attempting to round Prince Albert Land 
by the south through Dolphin Strait, reached 
Cambridge Bay at the nearest point by ship of all 
the Franklin expeditions. He had to return west¬ 
ward, and only reached England in 1855, after an 
absence of five years and four months. 

From the east no less than ten vessels had 
attempted the Franklin sea search in 1851, com¬ 
prising two Admiralty expeditions, one private 
English one, an American combined government 
and private party, together with a ship put in com¬ 
mission by the wifely devotion of Lady Franklin. 
These all attempted the search of Lancaster 
Sound, where Franklin had last been seen, and 
they only succeeded in finding three graves of 
men who had died at an early stage, and had been 
buried on Beechey Island. Another set of four 
vessels were despatched under Sir Edward Belcher 
in 1852, who were fortunate enough to reach 
M‘Clure in the Investigator in the following year, 
and enable him to complete the north-west pas¬ 
sage, for which he gained the reward of ^10,000 
offered by Parliament in 1763. But Belcher was 
12 


178 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

obliged to abandon most of his vessels, one of 
which the Resolute , drifted over a thousand miles, 
and having been recovered by an American whaler, 
was refitted by the United States and presented 
to the Queen and people of Great Britain. 

Notwithstanding all these efforts, the Franklin 
remains have not yet been discovered, though Dr. 
Rae, as we have seen, had practically ascertained 
their terrible fate. Lady Franklin, however, was 
not satisfied with this vague information. She 
was determined to fit out still another expedition, 
though already over ^35,000 had been spent by 
private means, mostly from her own personal for¬ 
tune; and in 1857 the steam yacht Fox was de¬ 
spatched under M‘Clintock, who had already 
shown himself the most capable master of sledge 
work. He erected a monument to the Franklin 
expedition on Beechey Island in 1858, and then 
following Peel Sound, he made inquiries of the 
natives throughout the winter of 1858-59. This 
led him to search King William Land, where, on 
the 25th May, he came across a bleached human 
skeleton lying on its face, showing that the man 
had died as he walked. Meanwhile, Hobson, one 
of his companions, discovered a record of the 
Franklin expedition, stating briefly its history 
between 1845 an d 1848; and with this definite 
information of the fate of the Franklin expe¬ 
dition M‘Clintock returned to England in 1859, 
having succeeded in solving the problem of 
Franklin’s fate, while exploring over 800 miles of 
coast-line in the neighbourhood of King William 
Land. 

The result of the various Franklin expeditions 
had thus been to map out the intricate network 
of islands dotted over the north of North America. 


THE POLES. 


*79 



North polar region—eastern half. 









I So THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

None of these, however, reached much farther 
north than 75 0 . 

Only Smith Sound promised to lead north of 
the 80th parallel. This had been discovered as 
early as 1616 by Baffin, whose farthest north was 
only exceeded by forty miles, in 1852, by Ingle- 
field in the Isabel , one of the ships despatched in 
search of Franklin. He was followed up by Kane 
in the Advance , fitted out in 1853 by the munifi¬ 
cence of two American citizens, Grinnell and Pea¬ 
body. Kane worked his way right through Smith 
Sound and Robeson Channel into the sea named 
after him. For two years he continued investigat¬ 
ing Grinned Land and the adjacent shores of 
Greenland. Subsequent investigations by Hayes 
in i860, and Had ten years later, kept alive the 
interest in Smith Sound and its neighbourhood; 
and in 1873 three ships were despatched under 
Captain (afterwards Sir George) Nares, who nearly 
completed the survey of Grinned Land, and one 
of his lieutenants, Pelham Aldrich, succeeded in 
reaching 82.48° N. About the same time, an Aus¬ 
trian expedition under Payer and Weyprecht ex¬ 
plored the highest known land, much to the east, 
named by them Franz Josef Land, after the Aus¬ 
trian Emperor. 

Simultaneously interest in the northern regions 
was aroused by the successful exploit of the north¬ 
east passage by Professor (afterwards Baron) Nor- 
denskiold, who had made seven or eight voyages 
in Arctic regions between 1858 and 1870. He first 
established the possibility of passing from Norway 
to the mouth of the Yenesei in the summer, making 
two journeys in 1875-76. These have since been 
followed up for commercial purposes by Captain 
Wiggins, who has frequently passed from Eng- 


THE POLES. 


181 


land to the mouth of the Yenesei in a merchant 
vessel. As Siberia develops there can be little 
doubt that this route will become of increasing 
commercial importance. Professor Nordenskiold, 
however, encouraged by his easy passage to the 
Yenesei, determined to try to get round into Be¬ 
ring Strait from that point, and in 1878 he started 
in the Vega , accompanied by the Lena , and a col¬ 
lier to supply them with coal. On the 19th Au¬ 
gust they passed Cape Chelyuskin, the most north¬ 
erly point of the Old World. From here the Lena 
appropriately turned its course to the mouth of its 
namesake, while the Vega proceeded on her course, 
reaching on the 12th September Cape North, with¬ 
in 120 miles of Bering Strait; this cape Cook had 
reached from the east in 1778. Unfortunately 
the ice became packed so closely that they could 
not proceed farther, and they had to remain in 
this tantalising condition for no less than ten 
months. On the 18th July, 1879, the ice broke up, 
and two days later the Vega rounded East Cape 
with flying colours, saluting the easternmost coast 
of Asia in honour of the completion of the north¬ 
east passage. Baron Nordenskiold has since en¬ 
joyed a well-earned leisure from his arduous la¬ 
bours in the north by studying and publishing the 
history of early cartography, on which he has is¬ 
sued two valuable atlases, containing fac-similes 
of the maps and charts of the Middle Ages. 

General interest thus re-aroused in Arctic ex¬ 
ploration brought about a united effort of all the 
civilised nations to investigate the conditions of 
the Polar regions. An international Polar Confer¬ 
ence was held at Hamburg in 1879, at which it was 
determined to surround the North Pole for the years 
1882-83 by stations of scientific observation, in- 


182 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

tended to study the conditions of the Polar Ocean. 
No less than fifteen expeditions were sent forth, 
some to the Antarctic regions, but most of them 
round the North Pole. Their object was more to 
subserve the interest of physical geography than 
to promote the interest of geographical discovery ; 
but one of the expeditions, that of the United 
States under Lieutenant A. W. Greely, again took 
up the study of Smith Sound and its outlets, and 
one of his men, Lieutenant Lockwood, succeeded 
in reaching 83.24° N., within 450 miles of the Pole, 
and up to that time the farthest north reached by 
any human being. The Greely expedition also 
succeeded in showing that Greenland was not so 
much ice-capped as ice-surrounded. 

Hitherto the universal method by which discov¬ 
eries had been made in the Polar regions was to 
establish a base at which sufficient food was cached, 
then to push in any required direction as far as 
possible, leaving successive caches to be returned 
to when provisions fell short on the forward jour¬ 
ney. But in 1888, Dr. Fridjof Nansen determined 
on a bolder method of investigating the interior 
of Greenland. He was deposited upon the east 
coast, where there were no inhabitants, and started 
to cross Greenland, his life depending upon the 
success of his journey, since he left no reserves in 
the rear and it would be useless to return. He suc¬ 
ceeded brilliantly in his attempt, and his exploit 
was followed up by two successive attempts of 
Lieut. Peary in 1892-95, who succeeded in cross¬ 
ing Greenland at much higher latitude even than 
Nansen. 

The success of his bold plan encouraged Dr. 
Nansen to attempt an even bolder one. He had 
become convinced, from the investigations con- 


THE POLES. 


i8 3 

ducted by the international Polar observations of 
1882-83, that there was a continuous drift of the 
ice across the Arctic Ocean from the north-east 
shore of Siberia. He had a vessel built for him, 
the now renowned Fram, especially intended to 
resist the pressure of the ice. He reckoned that 
the drift would take some three years, and pro¬ 
visioned the Fram for five. The results of his 
venturous voyage confirmed in almost every par¬ 
ticular his remarkable plan. The drift of the 
ice carried him across the Polar Sea within the 
three years he had fixed upon for the probable 
duration of his journey; but finding that the drift 
would not carry him far enough north, he left the 
Fram with a companion, and advanced straight 
towards the Pole, reaching in April, 1895, farthest 
north, 86.14°, within nearly 200 miles of the Pole. 
On his return journey he was lucky enough to 
come across Mr. F. Jackson, who in the Wind¬ 
ward had established himself in 1894 in Franz 
Josef Land. The rencontre of the two intrepid 
explorers forms an apt parallel of the celebrated 
encounter of Stanley and Livingstone, amidst en¬ 
tirely opposite conditions of climate. 

In the winter of 1899-1900 one of the sledge 
parties sent out from Franz Josef Land by the 
expedition of the Duke of Abruzzi succeeded in 
extending this limit to 86° 33'. Andree, in the 
autumn of 1897 started in a balloon for the Pole, 
provisioned for a long stay in the Arctic regions. 
Nothing has been heard of him, and it is now 
almost certain that he has perished. Lieut. Peary 
returned to the north of Greenland, July 4, 1898, 
and remained until August, 1902, and in April, 
1902, reached 84° 17' N. in the Polar Sea north 
of Cape Hecla. The expedition under Evelyn 


184 THE STORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY. 

Baldwin, which in 1901 attempted the dash to the 
Pole from the base of Franz Josef Land, re¬ 
turned in 1902, having accomplished almost 
nothing. Peary, however, in 1906, reached 87.6° 
by way of Smith Sound, traced the north coast 
of Grant Land, and discovered new land in about 
ioo° W. 

In July, 1908, Peary left New York in the 
Roosevelt on his eighth Arctic expedition. After 
wintering near Cape Sheridan, a party of seven, 
accompanied by 59 Eskimos, left the Roosevelt 
in sledges in February, 1909. From 84° most of 
the Eskimos were sent back, and 16 men, with 12 
sledges and 100 dogs, started on the final dash 
which was to result in the discovery of the Pole. 
Peary reached the Pole on April 6, 1909. He 
found surrounding it, as had been surmised for 
many years, a continuous ice field, and soundings 
of 9,000 feet failed to reach the sea bottom. The 
return journey was made without mishap. 

Meanwhile interest in Antarctic exploration 
had been revived. C. E. Borchgrevink, of Nor¬ 
way, explored Victoria Land in 1894-95, and in 
1897 made an unsuccessful attempt to reach the 
Pole, reaching 78.5°. Dr. Otto Nordenskiold, of 
Sweden, headed an expedition in 1901-4 which 
reached Cape Seymour, and during the same 
period a British expedition under Capt. R. F. 
Scott explored the inland ice of Victoria Land 
and reached latitude 82° 17'. A British national 
expedition in 1903-5 explored the region south¬ 
east of Cape Horn and drifting along the ice bar¬ 
rier discovered King Edward VII Land. 

The quest of the South Pole began in earnest 
with the sending out of the British national ex¬ 
pedition under Lieut. Ernest Shackleton in 1907. 


In January, 1909, a few days before one of his 
parties reached the South magnetic pole, Shack- 
leton gained a point within 111 miles of the South 
Pole and was able to report that the Pole was 
situated on a high plateau about 10,000 feet above 
sea level. Capt. Scott left New Zealand on his 
second expedition in November, 1910, with the 
intention of taking up the exploration of the Ant¬ 
arctic continent at the point where his former 
expedition and that of Shackleton had left off. 
Scott reached the Pole on January 18, 1912, only 
to find that he had been anticipated by Capt. 
Roald Amundsen. Amundsen, who was the first 
to accomplish, in 1903, the complete traverse of 
the Northwest Passage, had left Norway early 
in 1911 for an expedition to the Arctic. Sud¬ 
denly changing his plans to attempt the South 
Pole, he spent the winter of 1909 on the ice bar¬ 
rier at Bay of Whales, Ross Sea. Leaving his 
camp on October 20, 1911, he reached the Pole 
on December 14, by a route about 750 miles in 
length. Amundsen returned in safety, the whole 
expedition having been favored by good weather 
conditions. But Capt. Scott, who had been op¬ 
posed by storms on his final dash to the Pole, was 
overtaken by a blizzard on his return journey 
and perished with cold and hunger with four com¬ 
panions, on March 29, 1912. Thus to the end 
polar discovery claimed its toll of human lives. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 



B.C. 

xir . 

600. 


570. 


501. 


450. 


446. 

■ cir . 

450. 

xir . 

333- 


332. 


330. 

• cir . 

300. 

cir . 

200. 


100. 

60-54. 


20. 

bef . 

12. 


A.D. 


150. 


230. 

400-14. 


499. 

518-21. 


540. 

629-46. 


Marseilles founded. 

Anaximander of Miletus invents maps and the gno¬ 
mon. 

Hecataeus of Miletus writes the first geography. 

Himilco the Carthaginian said to have visited Britain. 

Herodotus describes Egypt and Scythia. 

Hanno the Carthaginian sails down the west coast 
of Africa as far as Sierra Leone. 

Pytheas visits Britain and the Low Countries. 

Alexander conquers Persia and visits India. 

Nearchus sails from the Indus to the Arabian Gulf. 

Megasthenes describes the Punjab. 

Eratosthenes founds scientific geography. 

Marinus of Tyre, founder of mathematical geo¬ 
graphy. 

Caesar conquers Gaul; visits Britain, Switzerland, 
and Germany. 

Strabo describes the Roman Empire. First mention 
of Thule and Ireland. 

Agrippa compiles a Mappa Mundi , the foundation 
of all succeeding ones. 

Ptolemy publishes his geography. 

The Peutinger Table pictures the Roman roads. 

Fa-hien travels through and describes Afghanistan 
and India. 

Hoei-Sin said to have visited the kingdom of Fu- 
sang, 20,000 furlongs east of China (identified by 
some with California). 

Hoei-Sing and Sung-Yun visit and describe the 
Pamirs and the Punjab. 

Cosmas Indicopleustes visits India, and combats the 
sphericity of the globe. 

Hiouen-Tshang travels through Turkestan, Afghan¬ 
istan, India, and the Pamirs. 

186 



671 - 95 - 

776 . 

851-916. 

86i. 

884. 

Hr . 890. 

Hr . 900. 
912-30. 


921. 

969. 

985. 

Hr . 1000. 


mi. 

1154 . 

1159 - 73 . 

Hr . 1180. 

1255. 

1260-71. 


1271-95. 


1280. 
1284. 
bef . 1290. 
1292. 

1325-78. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 187 

I-tsing travels through and describes Java, Sumatra, 
and India. 

The Mappa Mundi of Beatus. 

Sulaiman and Abu Zaid visit China. 

Naddod discovers Iceland. 

Ibn Khordadbeh describes the trade routes between 
Europe and Asia. 

Wulfstan and Otheresail to the Baltic and the North 
Cape. 

Gunbiorn discovers Greenland. 

The geographer Mas’udi describes the lands of Is¬ 
lam, from Spaint o Further India, in his “ Mead¬ 
ows of Gold.” 

Ahmed Ibn Fozlan describes the Russians. 

Ibn Haukal composes his book on Ways. 

Eric the Red colonises Greenland. 

Lyef, son of Eric the Red, discovers Newfoundland 
(Helluland), Nova Scotia (Markland), and the 
mainland of North America (Vinland). 

Earliest use of the water-compass by Chinese. 

Edrisi, geographer to King Roger of Sicily, produces 
his geography. 

Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela visited the Persian Gulf; 
reported on India. 

The compass first mentioned by Alexander Neckam. 

William .Ruysbroek (Rubruquis), a Fleming, visits 
Karakorum. 

The brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, father and 
uncle of Marco Polo, make their first trading 
venture through Central Asia. 

They make their second journey, accompanied by 
Marco Polo ; and about 1275 arrived at the Court 
of Kublai Khan in Shangfu, whence Marco Polo 
was entrusted with several missions to Cochin 
China, Khanbalig (Pekin), and the Indian Seas. 

Hereford map of Richard of Haldingham. 

The Ebstorf Mappa Mundi. 

The normal Portulano compiled in Barcelona. 

Friar John of Monte Corvino, travels in India, and 
afterwards becomes Archbishop of Pekin. 

Ibn Batuta, an Arab of Tangier, after performing the 
Mecca pilgrimage through N. Africa, visits Syria, 
Quiloa (E. Africa), Ormuz, S. Russia, Bulgaria, 
Khiva, Candahar, and attached himself to the 


188 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


1316-30. 


1320. 

1312-31. 

1327 - 72 . 

1328. 

1328- 49- 


1339 - 

I35i. 

1375 - 

cir. 1400. 

1419. 

1419-40. 

1420. 
1432. 
1442. 

1442-44. 

1457 - 

1462. 

1468-74. 


1471. 

1471. 

1474. 

1478. 

1484. 


Court of Delhi, 1334-42, whence he was de¬ 
spatched on an embassy to China. After his 
return he visited Timbuctoo. 

Odorico di Pordenone, a Minorite friar, travelled 
through India, by way of Persia, Bombay, and 
Surat, to Malabar, the Coromandel coast, and 
thence to China and Tibet. 

Flavio Gioja of Amalfi invents the compass box and 
card. 

Abulfeda composes his geography. 

Sir John Mandeville said to have written his travels 
in India. 

Friar Jordanus of Severac, Bishop of Quilon. 

John de Marignolli, a Franciscan friar, made a mis* 
sion to China, visited Quilon in 1347, and made a 
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas in India in 
1349 - 

Angelico Dulcert of Majorca draws a Portulano. 

The Medicean Portulano compiled. 

Cresquez, the Jew, of Majorca, improves Dulcert’s 
Portulano (Catalan map). 

Jehan Bethencourt re-discovers the Canaries. 

Prince Henry the Navigator establishes a geograph¬ 
ical seminary at Sagi-es (died 1460). 

Nicolo Conti, a noble Venetian, travelled throughout 
Southern India and along the Bombay coast. 

Zarco discovers Madeira. 

Gonsalo Cabral re-discovers the Azores. 

Nuno Tristao reaches Cape de Verde. 

Abd-ur-Razzak, during an embassy to India, visited 
Calicut, Mangalore, and Vijayanagar. 

Fra Mauro’s map. 

Pedro de Cintra reaches Sierra Leone. 

Athanasius Nikitin, a Russia, travelled from the 
Volga, through Central Asia and Persia, to Gujerat, 
Cambay, and Chaul, whence he proceeded inland 
to Bidar and Golconda. 

Fernando Poo discovers his island. 

Pedro d’Escobar crosses the line. 

Toscanelli’s map (foundation of Behaim globe and 
Columbus’ guide). 

Second printed edition of Ptolemy, with twenty- 
seven maps—practically the first atlas. 

Diego Cam discovers the Congo. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


i486. 

14S7. 

1492. 

1492. 

1492. 

1493 . 
1493 . 

1494-99. 

1497. 


1497. 

1498. 

1499 - 

1499. 

1500. 
1500. 

1500. 

1501. 

1501. 

1501. 

1502. 

1502- 4. 

1503- 8. 
1505. 


1507- 

1509. 

1512. 

1513 . 
I5I3- 


189 

Bartholomew Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope. 

Pedro de Covilham visits Ormuz, Goa, and Malabar, 
and afterwards settled in Abyssinia. 

Martin Behaim makes his globe. 

6th September. Columbus starts from the Canaries. 

12th October. Columbus lands at San Salvador 
(Watling Island). 

3rd May. Bull of partition between Spain and 
Portugal issued by Pope Alexander VI. 

September. Columbus on his second voyage dis¬ 
covers Jamaica. 

Hieronimo di Santo Stefana, a Genoese, visited 
Malabar and the Coromandel coast, Ceylon and 
Pegu. 

Vasco da Gama rounds the Cape, sees Natal (Christ¬ 
mas Day) and Mozambique, lands at Zanzibar, 
and crosses to Calicut. 

John Cabot re-discovers Newfoundland. 

Columbus on his third voyage discovers Trinidad and 
the Orinoco. 

Amerigo Vespucci discovers Venezuela. 

Pinzon discovers mouth of Amazon, and doubles 
Cape St. Roque. 

Pedro Cabral discovers Brazil on his way to Calicut. 

First map of the New World, by Juan de la Cosa. 

Corte Real lands at mouth of St. Lawrence, and re¬ 
discovers Labrador. 

Vespucci coasts down S. America and proves that it 
is a New World. 

Tristan d’Acunha discovers his island. 

Juan di Nova discovers the island of Ascension. 

Bermudez discovers his islands. 

Columbus on his fourth voyage explores Honduras. 

Travels of Ludovico di Varthema in Further India. 

Mascarenhas discovers the islands of Bourbon and 
Mauritius. 

Martin Waldseemiiller proposes to call the New 
World America in his Cosmographia. 

Malacca visited by Lopes di Sequira. 

Molucca, or Spice Islands, visited by Francisco 
Serrao. 

Strasburg Ptolemy contains twenty new maps by 
Waldseemiiller, forming the first modem atlas. 

Ponce de Leon discovers Florida. 


190 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


1513. Vasco Nunez de Balbao crosses the Isthmus of Pan¬ 
ama, and sees the Pacific. 

1517. Sebastian Cabot said to have discovered Hudson’s 
Bay. 

1517. Juan Diaz de Solis discovers the Rio de la Plata, 

and is murdered on the island of Martin Garcia. 

1518. Grijalva discovers Mexico. 

1519. Fernando Cortez conquers Mexico. 

1519. Fernando Magellan starts on the circumnavigation 
of the globe. 

1519. Guray explores north coast of Gulf of Mexico. 

1520. Schoner’s second globe. 

1520. Magellan sees Monte Video, discovers Patagonia and 

Tierra del Fuego, and traverses the Pacific. 
1520—26. Alvarez explores the Soudan. 

1521. Magellan discovers the Ladrones (Marianas), and is 

killed on the Philippines. 

1522. Magellan’s ship Victoria , under Sebastian del Cano, 

reaches Spain, having circumnavigated the globe 
in three years. 

1524. Verazzano, on behalf of the French King, coasts 
from Cape Fear to New Hampshire. 

1527. Saavedra sails from west coast of Mexico to the Mo¬ 
luccas. 

1529. Line of demarcation between Spanish and Portu¬ 
guese fixed at 17 0 east of Moluccas. 

1531. Francisco Pizarro conquers Peru. 

1532. Cortez visits California. 

1534. Jacques Cartier explores the gulf and river of St. 

Lawrence. 

1535. Diego d’Almagro conquers Chili. 

1536. Gonsalo Pizarro passes the Andes. 

1537-58. Ferdinand Mendez Pinto travels to Abyssinia, India, 
the Malay Archipelago, China, and Japan. 

1538. Gerhardt Mercator begins his career as geographer. 

(Globe, 1541 ; projection, 1539; died 1594 ; atlas, 
1595 .) 

1539. Francesco de Ulloa explores the Gulf of California. 

1541. Orellana sails down the Amazon. 

1542. Ruy Lopez de Villalobos discovers New Philippines, 

Garden Islands, and Pelew Islands, and takes pos¬ 
session of the Philippines for Spain. 

1542. Cabrillo advances as far as Cape Mendocino. 

1542. Japan first visited by Antonio de Mota. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


I 9 I 


1542 . 

1543- 

r 544- 

1549- 

1553 . 

1554. 

1556 - 72 . 

1558 . 

1567. 

1572 . 

1573- 

1576 . 

1577-79- 

1579- 

1580. 

1586. 

1590. 

1592. 

1592. 

1596. 

1596. 

1598. 

1598. 

1599- 

1603. 

1605. 

1606. 


1608. 

1609. 

1610. 

1611. 
1615. 


Gaetano sees the Sandwich Islands. 

Ortez de Retis discovers New Guinea. 

Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia. 

Bareto and Homera explore the lower Zambesi. 

Sir Hugh Willoughby attempts the North-East Pass¬ 
age past North Cape, and sights Novaya Zemlya. 

Richard Chancellor, Willoughby’s pilot, reaches 
Archangel, and travels overland to Moscow. 

Antonio Laperis’ atlas published at Rome. 

Anthony Jenkinson travels from Moscow to Bok¬ 
hara. 

Alvaro Mendana discovers Solomon Islands. 

Juan Fernandez discovers his island, and St. Felix 
and St. Ambrose Islands. 

Abraham Ortelius’ Teatrum Orbis Terrarum. 

Martin Frobisher discovers his bay. 

Francis Drake circumnavigates the globe, and ex¬ 
plores the west coast of North America. 

Yermak Timovief seizes Sibir, on the Irtish. 

Dutch settle in Guiana. 

John Davis sails through his strait, and reaches lat, 
72 0 N. 

Battel visits the lower Congo. 

The Molyneux globe. 

Juan de Fuca imagines he has discovered an im* 
mense sea in the north-west of North America. 

William Barentz discovers Spitzbergen, and reaches 
lat. 8o° N. 

Payz traverses the Horn of Africa, and visits the 
source of the Blue Nile. 

Mendana discovers Marquesas Islands. 

Hakluyt publishes his Principal Navigations. 

Houtman reaches Achin, in Sumatra. 

Stephen Bennett re-discovers Cherry Island, 74.13 0 
N. 

Louis Vaes de Torres discovers his strait. 

Quiros discovers Tahiti and north-east coast of Aus¬ 
tralia. 

Champlain discovers Lake Ontario. 

Henry Hudson discovers his river. 

Hudson passes through his strait into his bay. 

Jan Mayen discovers his island. 

Lemaire rounds Cape Horn (Hoorn), and sees New 
Britain. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


192 

1616. Dirk Hartog coasts West Australia to 27 0 S. 

1616. Baffin discovers his bay. 

1618. George Thompson, a Barbary merchant, sails up the 

Gambia. 

1619. Edel and Houtman coast Western Australia to 32^° 

S. (Edel’s Land). 

1622. Dutch ship Leeuwin reaches south-west cape of 

Australia. 

1623. Lobo explores Abyssinia. 

1627. Peter Nuyts discovers his archipelago. 

1630. First meridian of longitude fixed at Ferro, in the 

Canary Islands. 

1631. Fox explores Hudson’s Bay. 

1638. W. J. Blaeu’s Atlas. 

1639. Kupiloff crosses Siberia to the east coast. 

1642. Abel Jansen Tasman discovers Van Diemen’s Land 
(Tasmania) and Staaten Land (New Zealand). 

1642. Wasilei Pojarkof traces the course of the Amur. 

1643. Hendrik Brouwer identifies New Zealand. 

1643. Tasman discovers Fiji. 

1644. Michael Staduchin reaches the Kolima. 

1645. Nicholas Sanson’s atlas. 

1645. Italian Capuchin Mission explores the lower Congo. 
1648. The Cossack Dishinef sails between Asia and Amer¬ 
ica. 

1650. Staduchin reaches the Anadir, and meets Dishinef. 
1682. La Salle descends the Mississippi. 

1696. Russians reach Kamtschatka. 

1699. Dampier discovers his strait. 

1700. Delisle’s maps. 

1701. Sinpopoff describes the land of the Tschutkis. 

1718. Jesuit map of China and East Asia published by the 

Emperor Kang-hi. 

1721. Hans Egede resettles Greenland. 

1731. Hadley invented the sextant. 

1731. Krupishef sails round Kamtschatka. 

1731. Paulutski travels round the north-east corner of Si¬ 
beria. 

1 735-37. Maupertuis measures an arc of the meridian. 

1739-44. Lord George Anson circumnavigates the globe. 

1740. Varenne de la Veranderye discovers the Rocky 

Mountains. 

1741. Behring discovers his strait. 

1742. Chelyuskin discovers his cape. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


193 


1743-44. La Condamine explores the Amazon. 

1745-61. Bourguignon d’Anville produces his maps. 

1761-67. Carsten Niebuhr surveys Arabia. 

1764. John Byron surveys the Falkland Islands. 

1767. First appearance of the Nautical Almanac. 

1765. Harrison perfects the chronometer. 

1768. Carteret discovers Pitcairn Island, and sails through 

St. George’s Channel, between New Britain and 
New Ireland. 

1768- 71. Cook’s first voyage ; discovers New Zealand and 

east coast of Australia; passes through Torres 
Strait. 

1769- 71. Hearne traces river Coppermine. 

1769-71. James Bruce re-discovers the source of the Blue Nile 
in Abyssinia. 

1770. Liakhoff discovers the New Siberian Islands. 
1771-72. Pallas surveys West and South Siberia. 

1776-79. Cook’s third voyage ; surveys North-West Passage ; 

discovers Owhyhee (Hawaii), where he was killed. 
1785-88. La Perouse survey north-east coast of Asia and 
Japan, discovers Saghalien, and completes delim¬ 
itation of the ocean. 

1 785-94. Billings surveys East Siberia. 

1787-88. Lesseps surveys Kamtschatka and crosses the Old 
World from east to west. 

1788. The African Association founded. 

1789-93. Mackenzie discovers his river, and first crosses North 
America. 

1792. Vancouver explores his island. 

1793. Browne reaches Darfur, and reports the existence of 

the White Nile. 

1796. Mungo Park reaches the Niger. 

1796. Lacerda explores Mozambique. 

1797. Bass discovers his strait. 

1799-1804. Alexander von Humboldt explores South America. 

1804- 4. Lewis and Clarke explore the basin of the Missouri. 
1800-4. Flinders coasts south coast of Australia. 

1805- 7. Pike explores the country between the sources of the 

Mississippi and the Red River. 

1810-29. Malte-Brun publishes his Giographie Universelle . 
1814. Evans discovers Lachlan and Macquarie rivers. 

1816. Captain Smith discovers South Shetland Isles. 
1817-20. Spix and Martius explore Brazil. 

1817. First edition of Stieler’s atlas. 

13 


194 


ANNALS OF DISCOVER*. 


1817-22. Captain King maps the coast-line of Australia. 

1819- 22. Franklin, Back, and Richardson attempt the North- 

West Passage by land. 

1819. Parry discovers Lancaster Strait and reaches 114 0 
W. 

1820- 23. Wrangel discovers his land. 

1821. Bellinghausen discovers Peter Island, the most 

southerly land then known. 

1822. Denham and Clapperton discover Lake Tchad, and 

visit Sokoto. 

1822-23. Scoresby explores the coast of East Greenland. 

1823. Weddell reaches 74.15 0 S. 

1826. Major Laing is murdered at Timbuctoo. 

1827. Parry reaches 82.45° N. 

1827. Rene Caillie visits Timbuctoo. 

1828- 31. Captain Sturt traces the Darling and the Murray. 

1829- 33. Ross attempts the North-West Passage; discovers 

Boothia Felix. 

1830. Royal Geographical Society founded, and next year 

united with the African Association. 

1831-35. Schomburgk explores Guiana. 

1831. Captain Biscoe discovers Enderby Land. 

1833, Back discovers Great Fish River. 

1835-49. Junghuhn explores Java. 

1837. T. Simpson coasts along the north mainlaind of 
North America 1277 miles. 

1838-40. Wood explores the sources of the Oxus. 

1838-40. Dumont d’Urville discovers Louis-Philippe Land 
and Ad61ie Land. 

1839. Balleny discovers his island. 

1839. Count Strzelecki discovers Gipps’ Land. 

1840. Captain Sturt travels in Central Australia. 

1840-42. James Ross reaches 78.10° S. ; discovers Victoria 

Land, and the volcanoes Erebus and Terror. 

1841. Eyre traverses south of Western Australia. 

1842- 62. E. F. Jomard’s Monuments de la Giographie pub¬ 

lished. 

1843- 47. Count Castelnau traces the source of the Paraguay. 

1844. Leichhardt explores Southern Australia. 

1845. Hue explores Tibet. 

1845. Petermann’s Mittheilungen first published. 

1845-47. Franklin’s last voyage. 

1846. First edition of K. v. Spruner’s Historische Hand- 

atlas. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


195 

1847. J. Rae connects Hudson’s Bay with east coast of 

Boothia. 

1848. Leichhardt attempts to traverse Australia, and dis¬ 

appears. 

1849- 56. Livingstone traces the Zambesi and crosses South 

Africa. 

1850- 54. M‘Clure succeeds in the North-West passage. 

1 850-5 5. Barth explores the Soudan. 

1853. Dr. Kane explores Smith's Sound. 

1854. Rae hears news of the Franklin expedition from the 

Eskimo. 

1854-65. Faidherbe explores Senegambia. 

1856-57. The brothers Schlagintweit cross the Himalayas, 
Tibet, and Kuen Lun. 

1856- 59. Du Chaillu travels in Central Africa. 

1857- 59. M‘Clintock discovers remains of the Franklin expe¬ 

dition, and explores King William Land. 

1858. Burton and Speke discover Lake Tanganyika, and 

Speke sees Lake Victoria Nyanza. 

1858- 64. Livingstone traces Lake Nyassa. 

1859. Valikhanoff reaches Kashgar. 

1860. Burke travels from Victoria to Carpentaria. 

i860. Grant and Speke, returning from Lake Victoria 
Nyanza, meet Baker coming up the Nile. 

1861-62. M'Douall Stuart traverses Australia from south to 
north. 

1863. W. G. Palgrave explores Central and Eastern Arabia. 

1864. Baker discovers Lake Albert Nyanza. 

1868. Nordenskiold reaches his highest point in Green¬ 
land, 81.42°. 

1868-71. Ney Elias traverses Mid-China. 

1868- 74. John Forrest penetrates from Western to Central 

Australia. 

1869- 71. Schweinfurth explores the Southern Soudan. 

1869-74. Nachtigall explores east of Tchad. 

1870. Fedchenko discovers Transalai, north of Pamir. 

1770. Douglas Forsyth reaches Yarkand. 

1871- 88. The four explorations of Western China by Prjevalsky. 

1872- 73. Payer and Weiprecht discover Franz Josef Land. 
1872-76. H. M. S. Challenge* examines the bed of the ocean. 
1872-76. Ernest Giles traverses North-West Australia. 

1873. Colonel Warburton traverses Australia from east to 
west. 

1873. Livingstone discovers Lake Moero. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


196 


1874- 75. 

1 875 - 94 - 
1876. 

1876- 77. 
1878-82. 

1878-79. 

1878-84. 

1878- 85. 

1879- 82. 

1880. 

1880- 82. 

1881- 87. 

1883. 

1886. 

1887. 
1887-89. 


1888. 

1888- 89. 

1889. 

1889- 90. 

1890. 
1892. 

1893- 97. 

1894- 95. 
1896. 
1899. 

1905. 

1906. 
1908-12. 

1909. 

1911. 

1912. 

I9I3- 


Lieut. Cameron crosses equatorial Africa. 

Elisee Reclus publishes his Gtographie Universelle. 

Albert Markham reaches 83.20° N. on the Nares 
expedition. 

Stanley traces the course of the Congo. 

The Pundit Krishna traces the course of the Yang- 
tse, Pekong, and Brahmaputra. 

Nordenskiold solves the North-East Passage along 
the north coast of Siberia. 

Joseph Thomson explores East-Central Africa. 

Serpa Pinto twice crosses Africa. 

The Jeannette passes through Behring Strait to the 
mouth of the Lena. 

Leigh Smith surveys south coast of Franz Josef Land. 

Bonvalot traverses the Pamirs. 

Wissmann twice crosses Africa, and discovers the left 
affluents of the Congo. 

Lockwood, on the Greely Mission, reaches 83.23° 
N., north cape of Greenland. 

Francis Gamier explores the coast of the Mekong. 

Younghusband travels from Pekin to Kashmir. 

Stanley conducts the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 
across Africa, and discovers the Pigmies, and the 
Mountains of the Moon. 

F. Nansen crosses Greenland from east to west. 

Captain Binger traces the bend of the Niger. 

The brothers Grjmailo explore Chinese Turkestan. 

Bonvalot and Prince Henri d'Orleans traverse Tibet. 

Selous and Jameson explore Mashonaland. 

Peary proves Greenland an island. 

Dr. Sven Hedin explores Chinese Turkestan, Tibet, 
and Mongolia. 

C. E. Borchgrevink visits Antarctica. 

Captain Bottego explores Somaliland. 

Abruzzi reaches farthest north (86° 33'). 

Roald Amundsen completes the Northwest Passage 
by boat. 

Amundsen locates the magnetic North Pole. 

V. Stefanssen proves Arctic maps wrong; discovers 
race of Eskimos hitherto unknown. 

Peary discovers the North Pole. 

Amundsen discovers the South Pole. 

Scott reaches the South Pole and perishes on his 
return journey. 

Dr. Hudson Stuck reaches the summit of Mt. 
McKinley. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


197 


EUROPE. 

Great Britain. —b.c. 450. Himilco. Circa 333. Py- 
theas. 60-54. Caesar. 

France. —b.c. circa 600. Marseilles founded. 57. Caesar. 
Russia.— a.d. 1554. Richard Chancellor. 

Baltic.— a.d. 890. Wulfstan and Othere. 

Iceland.— a.d. 861. Naddod. 

ASIA. 

India.— b.c. 332. Alexander. 330. Nearchus. Circa 
300. Megasthenes. A.d. 400-14. Fa-hien. 518-21. Hoei- 
Sing and Sung-Yun. 540. Cosmas Indicopleustes. 629-46. 
Hiouen-Tshang. 671-95. I-tsing. 1159-73. Benjamin of 
Tudela. 1304-78. Ibn Batuta. 1327-72. Mandeville. 1328. 
Jordanus of Severac. 1328-49. Johnde Marignolli. 1419-40. 
Nicolo Conti. 1442-44. Abd-ur-Razzak. 1468-74. Athan¬ 
asius Nikitin. 1487. Pedro de Covilham, 1494-99. Hiero- 
nimo di Santo Stefano. 1503-8. Ludovico di Varthema. 

Farther India.— a.d. 1503. Ludovico di Varthema. 
1509. Lopes di Sequira. 1886. Francis Gamier. 

China.— a.d. 851-916. Sulaiman and Abu Zaid. 1292. 
John of Monte Corvino. 1316-30. Odorico di Pordenone. 
1328-49. John de Marignolli. 1537-58. Ferdinand Mendez 
Pinto. 1868-71. Ney Elias. 1871-88. Prjevalsky. 1878-82. 
Pundit Krishna. 1889. Grjmailo brothers. 1896. Prince 
Henri d’Orleans. 

Japan.— a.d. 1542. Antonio de Mota. 1785-88. La 
Perouse. 

Arabia.— a.d. 1671-67. Carsten Niebuhr. 1863. Pal- 
grave. 

Persia. —b.c. 332. Alexander, a.d. 1468-74. Athanasius 
Nikitin. 

Mongolia.— a.d. 1255. Ruysbroek (Rubruquis). 1260- 
71. Nicolo and Maffeo Polo. 1271. Marco Polo. 1893-97. 
Dr. Sven Hedin. 

Tibet.— a.d. 1845. Hue. 1856-7. Schlagintweit. 1878. 
Pundit Krishna. 1887. Younghusband. 1889-90. Bonvalot 
and Prince Henri d’Orleans. 1893-97. Dr. Sven Hedin. 

Central Asia. — a.d. 1558. Anthony Jenkinson. 1642. 
Wasilei Pojarkof. 1838-40. Wood. 1859. Valikhanoff. 1870. 
Douglas Forsyth. 1870. Fedchenko. 1880. Bonvalot. 1893. 
Littledale. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


198 

Siberia. — a.d. 1579. Timovief. 1639. Kupiloff. 1644- 
50. Staduchin. 1648. Dshineif. 1701. Smpopoff. 1731. 
Paulutski. 1742. Chelyuskin. 1771-72. Pallas. 1785-94. 
Billings. 

Kamtschatka.— a.d. 1696. Russians. 1731. Krupishef. 
1787-88. Lesseps. 

AFRICA. 

A.d. circa 450. Hanno. 1420. Zarco. 1462. Pedro.de 
Cintra. 1484. Diego Cam. i486. Bartholomew Diaz. 1497. 
Vasco da Gama. 1520. Alvarez. 1549. Bareto and Homera. 
1590. Battel. 1596. Payz. 1618. Thompson. 1623. Lobo. 
1645. Italian Capuchins. 1769-71. Bruce. 1793. Browne. 
1796. Mungo Park. 1796. Lacerda. 1822. Denham and 
■Clapperton. 1826. Laing. 1827. Rene Caillie. 1849-73. 
Livingstone. 1850-55. Barth. 1854-65. Faidherbe. 1856- 
59. Du Chaillu. 1858. Burton and Speke, i860. Grant and 
Speke. 1864. Baker. 1869-71. Schweinfurth. 1869-74. 
Nachtigall. 1874-75. Cameron. 1876-89. Stanley. 1878- 
■84. Thomson. 1878-85. Serpa Pinto. 1881-87. Wissmann. 
1888-89. Binger. 1890. Selous and Jameson. 1891-92. 
Monteil. 1896. Bottego. 1896. Donaldson Smith. 1897. 
Foa. 

NORTH AMERICA. 

A.D. 499. Hoei-Sin. Circa 1000. Lyef. 1497, 1517. John 
and Sebastian Cabot. 1500. Corte Real. 1513. Ponce de 
Leon. 1524. Verazzano. 1532. Cortez. 1534. Cartier. 
1539. Ulloa. 1542. Cabrillo. 1576. Frobisher. 1586. 
Davis. 1592. Juan de Fuca. 1608. Champlain. 1609, 10. 
Hudson. 1631. Fox. 1682. La Salle. 1740. Varenne de la 
Veranderye. 1741. Behring. 1789-93. Mackenzie. 1792. 
Vancouver. 1800-4. Lewis and Clarke. 1805-7. Pike 
1837. Simpson. 

SOUTH AMERICA. 

a.d. 1498. Columbus. 1499-1501. Amerigo Vespucci. 
1499. Pinzon. 1500. Pedro Cabral. 1517. Juan Diaz de 
:Solis. 1519-20. Magellan. 1531. Francisco Pizarro. 1535. 
D’Almagro. 1536. Gonsalo Pizarro. 1541. Orellana. 1572. 
Juan Fernandez. 1580. Dutch in Guiana. 1615. Lemaire. 
1743-44. La Condamine. 1764. John Byron. 1799-1804. 
Humboldt. 1817-20. Spix and Martius. 1831-35. Schom- 
tburgk. 1843-47. Castelnau. 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


199 


CENTRAL AMERICA. 

a.d. 1502. Cplumbus. 1513. Vasco Nunez de Balbao. 
1518. Grijalva. 1519- Fernando Cortez. 1519. Guray. 

AUSTRALIA. 

A.D. 1605. Torres. 1606. Quiros. 1616. Hartog. 1619. 
Edel and Houtman. 1622. The Leeuwin. 1627. Nuyts. 
1699. Dampier. 1700. Cook. 1797. Bass. 1801-4. Flin¬ 
ders. 1814. Evans. 1817-22. King. 1828-40. Sturt. 1839. 
Strzelecki. 1841. Eyre. 1844-48. Leichhardt, i860. Burke. 
1861-62. MacDouall Stuart. 1868-74. Forrest. 1872-76. 
Giles. 1873. Warburton. 1897. Carnegie. 

NEW ZEALAND. 

A.D. 1642. Tasman. 1643. Brouwer. 1768-79. Cook. 

POLYNESIA. 

A.D. 1512. Francisco Serrao. 1520, 21. Magellan. 1527. 
Saavedra. 1542. Gaetano. 1542. Ruy Lopez de Villalobos. 
1543. Ortez de Retis. 1567-98. Alvaro Mendana. 1599. 
Houtman. 1643. Tasman. 1768. Carteret. 1776-79. Cook. 
1835-49. Junghuhn. 1890. Macgregor. 

NORTH POLE. 

a.d. circa 900. Gunbidm. 985. Eric the Red. 1553. 
Willoughby. 1596. Barentz. 1603. Bennett. 1611. Jan 
Mayen. 1616. Baffin. 1721. Egedd. 1769-71. Hearne. 

1819- 22. Franklin, Back, and Richardson. 1819-27. Parry. 

1820- 23. Wrangel. 1922-23. Scoresby. 1829-33. Ross. 
1833. Back. 1845-47. Franklin. 1847-54. Rae. 1850-54. 
M‘Clure. 1853. Kane. 1857-59. M'Clintock. 1868-79. 
Nordenskiold. 1872-73. Payer and Weiprecht. 1876. Mark¬ 
ham. 1879-82. The Jeannette. 1880. Leigh Smith. 1883. 
Lockwood. 1888-97. Nansen. 1892 ; 1898-1902; 1907-9.. 
Peary. 1894-96. Jackson-Harmsworth expedition. 1899- 
1900. Abruzzi. 1901-02. Baldwin-Zeigler expedition. 

SOUTH POLE. 

A.d. 1816. Capt. Smith. 1821. Bellinghausen. 1823.. 
Weddell. 1831. Biscoe. 1838-40. Dumont d’Urville. 1839. 
Balleny. 1840-42. James Ross. 1894-1900. Borchgrevink. 


200 


ANNALS OF DISCOVERY. 


1901-4. Otto Nordenskiold. 1901-4; 1910-12. Scott. 

1907-9. Shackleton. 1911-12. Amundsen. 

CIRCUMNAVIGATORS. 

a.d. 1522. Sebastian del Cano. 1577-79. Drake. 1739-44. 
Lord George Anson. 

ATLANTIC OCEAN. 

A.D. 1400. Jehan Bethencours. 1432. Cabral. 1442. Nuno 
Tristao. 1471. Pedro d'Escobar. 1471. Fernando Po. 1492- 
93. Columbus. 1501. Juan ai Nova. 1501. Tristan d’Acun- 
ha. 1502. Bermudez. 

INDIAN OCEAN. 

A. D. 1505. Mascarenhas. 

PROGRESS OF GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCE. 

B. c. 570. Anaximander of Miletus. 501. Hecataeus of 
Miletus. 446. Herodotus. Circa 200. Eratosthenes. 100. 
Marinus of Tyre. 20. Strabo. Before 12. Agrippa. a.d. 
150. Ptolemy. 230. Peutinger Table. 776. Beatus. 884. 
Ibn Khordadbeh. 912-30. Mas’udi. 921. Ahmed Ibn Foz- 
lan. 969. Ibn Haukal. mi. Water-compass. 1154. Ed- 
risi. Circa 1180. Alexander Neckam. 1280. Hereford 
map. 1284. Ebstorf map. 1290. The normal Portulano. 
1320. Flavio Gioja. 1339. Dulcert. 1351. Medicean Portu¬ 
lano. 1375. Cresquez. 1419. Prince Henry the Navigator. 
1457. Fra Mauro. 1474. Toscanelli. 1478. 2nd ed. Ptolemy. 
1492. Behaim. 1500. Juan de la Cosa. 1507-13. Waldsee- 
miiller. 1520. Schoner. 1538. Mercator. 1544. Munster. 
1556-72. Laperis. 1573. Ortelius. 1592. Molyneux globe. 
1598. Hakluyt. 1630. Ferro meridian fixed. 1638. Blaeu. 
1645. Sanson. 1700. Delisle. 1718. Jesuit map of China. 
1731. Hadley. 1735-37. Maupertuis. 1745-61. Bourguignon 
d’Anville. 1765. Harrison. 1767. Nautical Almanac. 1788. 
African Association. 1810-29. Malte-Brun. 1817. Stieler. 
1830. Royal Geographical Society founded. 1842. Jomard. 
1845. Petermann. 1846. Spruner. 1875-94. Elisee Reclus. 
1872-76. The Challenger. 


INDEX 


A. 

Abrrzzi, Duke of, 185, 199. 

Abyssinia, 89, 156, 164, 

Acadie, 134. 

Africa, 31; circumnavigation cf, 
85; exploration of, 153. 

Alaska, 126, 137. 

Albert Nyanza, Lake, 159. 

Albuquerque, Affonso de, 94, 
no. 

Aldrich, Pelham, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 180. 

Alexander the Great, 24, 28, 37. 

Alexander VI., Pope, bull on 
discoveries, 96, 132. 

Alexandria, 26, 37; commercial 
importance of, 79, 82. 

Almegro, Diego de, 130, 131. 

Amazon, discovered, 108; ex¬ 
plored, 131. 

America, discovery of, 105; ori¬ 
gin of name, 109; partition of, 
128. 

Amerigo Vespucci, 108, 118. 

Amundsen, Roald, Antarctic ex¬ 
plorer, 185. 

Anaximander, 21. 

Andree, S. A., 185. 

Anthropophagi, 47. 

Antilla, Island of, 102. 

Antipodes, 47. 

Arabs, 54; commerce of, 82. 

Aristotle, 26. 

Armenia conquered by Mon¬ 
gols, 63. 

Ascension discovered, 94. 

Asia, 28, 45, 78. 

Asia Minor, 18, 33, 36, 40. 

Assyrians, 34, 35. 

Astrolabe perfected by Henry 
the Navigator, 85. 


Atahualpa, Inca, 131. 

Atlantis, Plato’s, 98. 

Australia, 123; exploration of, 
139; D’Anville’s map of, 144; 
first English settlement, 149. 


B. 

Babylonians, 19, 22, 23, 35. 

Back, C. J., Arctic explorer, 173. 

Baffin, William, discoveries of, 
122, 169, 180. 

Baker, Sir Samuel, explorations 
in Africa, 159, 160. 

Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, dis¬ 
covers Pacific Ocean, 128. 

Bangweolo, Lake, discovered, 
160. 

Barentz, William, 122, 169. 

Barrett, William, list of staples 
imported from the Orient, 80. 

Barth, African explorer. 158. 

Bass, Dr., explorations in Aus¬ 
tralia, 150. 

Batavia, Java, founded. 123. 

Beechey, Captain, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 172. 

Behaim’s, Martin, globe, 89, 104. 

Belcher, Sir Edward, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 177. 

Belgium, 26. 

Bering Vitus, explorations of, 
1x8, 126, 137. 

Bible, influence of, 44. 

Biorn discovers Vinland, 58. 

Black Sea, 23. 

Borchgrevink, C. E., Antarctic 
explorer, 184. 

Borneo, Portuguese in, 114, 

Botany Bay, 147, 150. 

201 




202 


INDEX. 


Brazil, discoveries in, 108; Por¬ 
tuguese in, 93, 132. 

Britain, 25, 28, 42, 53, 57. 

Bruce, James, African explorer, 
154 , 156 - 

Burgundy, kingdom of, 53. 

Burke, Australian explorer, 152. 

Burton, Sir Richard, explora¬ 
tions in Africa, 159. 

Byzantium, 19. See Constanti¬ 
nople. 

C. 

Cabot, John, 120, 133. 

Cabot, Sebastian, 120, 133. 

Cabral, Pedro Alvarez, Portu¬ 
guese navigator, 93. 

Cadmosto, Alvez, Venetian 
merchant, 88. 

Caesar, 40. 

Caillie, Rene, explorations in 
Africa, 158. 

California, discovered by Cortes, 
130; becomes a part of United 
States, 137. 

Calcutta, 92. 

Calicut. See Calcutta. 

Cam, Diego, Portuguese navi¬ 
gator, 88. 

Cambyses, 36. 

Canada, exploration of, 120, 133. 

Canary Islands, 31. 

Cano, Juan Sebastian del. See 
Del Cano. 

■Cape Bojador, 86. 

Cape Branco discovered, 86. 

Cape Colony, 123. 

Cape of Good Hope, 90, 91. 

Gape Verde discovered, 86. 

Cape Verde Islands discovered, 

88 . 

Caravan routes, 77, 78. 

Carpentaria, Gulf of, 140, 142. 

Carthaginians, 28, 39. 

Carteret, Sir George, 134. 

Cartier, Jacques, explores St. 
Lawrence, 120, 133. 

Cathay, 64. See China. 

Ceylon, ?8, 55, 94. 

Chad, Lake, 157, 158. 

Chaldreans, 35. 

Champlain, Samuel de, discov¬ 
eries of, 120; settles Quebec, 
134 - 

Chartrellor, Richard, reaches 
Archangel, 120, 124, 169. 


Chili conquered by Almegro, 131. 

China, 28, 55, 63, 65, 71, 73, 96, 
125. 

Chinchiz Khan, founder of Mon¬ 
gol Empire, 63. 

“ Christian Topography ” of 
Cosmas, 47. 

Chronometers, perfection of, 146. 

Cipangu. See Japan. 

Clapperton, Lieut., explorations 
in Africa, 157. 

“ Climates ” of Ptolemy, 32. 

Collinson, Capt. R., Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 176. 

Columbia River, explored, 13S. 

Columbus, Christopher, voyages 
and discoveries of, 99, 118; in 
Portugal, 90; and Cabral, 93. 

Commerce of Middle Ages, 80; 
value of roads to, 64. 

Compass, invention of, 59, 82; 
variability of, discovered by 
Columbus, 105. 

Congo Free State, 162. 

Congo River, discovered, 89; ex¬ 
ploration of, 154, 157, 160. 

Constantinople, 58; commercial 
importance of, 79. See Byzan¬ 
tium. 

Cook, James, voyages of, 118, 
145 , 149 - 

Coppermine River, 137, 172. 

Corsica, 39. 

Cortes, Hernando, 13; conquest 
of Mexico, 128. 

Cosmas Indicopleustes, 47. 

C'ovilham, Pedro di, Portuguese 
explorer, 89, 91. 

Cresquez, 60. 

Crozier, Arctic explorer, 174. 

Crusades, 55, 63. 

Cuba, Columbus in, 106. 

Cuzco, Inca capital of Peru, 131. 

Cynocephali, 49. 

Cyprus, 18. 

Cyrus the Great, 36. 

Cyrus the younger, 36. 


D. 

Da Gama, Vasco, voyages of, 
91, 94. 

Danube, 23. 

D’Anville’s map of Australia, 
140, 144- 








INDEX. 


203 


Davis, John, voyages of, 121, 
169. 

Delaware River, settlements on, 
134 - 

Del Cano, Juan Sebastian, cir¬ 
cumnavigator, 1x4, 130; coat of 
arms granted to, 116. 

De Leon, Ponce, discovers 
Florida, 130. 

Denham, Aiajor, explorations in 
Africa, 157. 

De Nuyts, explores Australia, 
142. 

D’Escobar, Pedro, Portuguese 
navigator, 88. 

Diaz, Bartholomew, Portuguese 
navigator, 89. 

Discovery, motives for, 14. 

Dulcert, Angelico, 60. 

Duquesne, Fort, 136. 

D’Lrville, Dumont, Antarctic 
explorer, 173. 

Dutch. See Holland. 

E. 

Earth, sphericity of, 26; denied 
by Cosmas, 47. 

East India Company, 123. 

Edels, Jan, explores Australia, 
142. 

Edrisi, 56. 

Egypt, 18, 23, 33, 36, 159. 

Elbe, the river, 26. 

Emmanuel, King of Portugal, 
90. 

Emin Pasha, 165. 

England, discoveries and ex¬ 
plorations in America, 119, 
133; East Indian policy, 123. 

Eratosthenes, 26, 37, 85. 

Erythrean Sea. See Red Sea. 

Estotiland, e8. 

Etrurians, 38. 

Euphrates, 23, 33. 

Euxine. See Black Sea. 

Evans, explorations in Austra¬ 
lia, 152. 

F. 

Ferdinand and Isabella assist 
Columbus, 103. 

Flinders, Australian explorer, 
1 so. 

Forrest, John, Australian ex¬ 
plorer, 152. 


Fortunate Insulce. See Canary 
Islands. 

France, 53; discoveries and ex¬ 
plorations in America, 119, 133. 

Franklin, Sir John, Arctic ex¬ 
plorations, 171, 172, 174. 

Frobisher, Martin, voyages of, 
120, 169. 

G. 

Gambia, River, discovered, 88. 

Ganges, 33. 

Gengis Khan. See Chinchiz 
Khan. 

Genoa as a commercial center, 

83. 

Germany, 28, 42, 53. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, explora¬ 
tions Of, 121. 

Giles, Ernest, Australian ex¬ 
plorer, 152. 

Gioja, Flavio, improves com¬ 
pass, 59. 

Gnomon, invention of, 22. 

Goa captured by Portuguese, 94. 

Gog and Magog, 46, 64. 

Gomez, Diogo, Portuguese nav¬ 
igator, 88. 

Gordon, General, 160, 165. 

Gorillas, 25. 

Grant, African explorer, 154, 159. 

Greece, 17, 18, 19, 36. 

Greely, Lieut. A. W., Arctic ex¬ 
plorations, 182. 

Greenland, 58, 120, 170. 

Grinnell, Arctic explorer, 180. 

Gryphons, 49. 

Gulliver’s Travels, 144. 

H. 

Hadley, inventor of sextant, 145. 

Hakluyt’s “ English Voyages 
and Navigations,” 80. 

Hall, Arctic explorer, 180. 

Hanno, 25. 

Harrison, John, chronometer 
maker, 146. 

Hartog, Dirk, explores Austra¬ 
lia, 142. 

Hawaii, Cook murdered at, 149. 

Hayes, Arctic explorer, 180. 

Hayti, Columbus in, 106. 

Hearne. explorer, 137. 

Hebrews, 34. 

Hecateus, 23. 




204 


INDEX. 


Henry the Navigator, Prince, 

62, 72, 84. 

Hereford, map, 49. 

Herodotus, 18, 22, 23, 38, 155. 
Hesiod, 18. 

Hippalus, 25. 

Hittites, 36. 

Hobson, Arctic explorer, 178. 
Holland, 26; discoveries in 
America, 119; commercial su¬ 
premacy of, 122; settlement of 
New Netherlands, 134; ex¬ 
ploration of Australia, 139. 
Homer, 18. 

Honduras, explored by Cortes, 
129. 

Houtman, Cornelius, Dutch 
navigator, 122. 

Hudson Bay Company, 136. 
Hudson Bay discovered, 121. 
Hudson, Henry, voyages of, 121. 
Hudson River discovered, 121; 

settlements on, 134. 

Hudson Strait discovered, 121. 
Huns, 53. 

Hyperboreans, 18. 

I. 

Ibn Batuta, travels of, 71. 
Iceland, 57. 

Ierne. See Ireland. 

India, 24, 36, 65, 72, 80; Portu¬ 
guese in, 92, 94; routes to, 78, 

85. 

Indo-China, 28. 

Indus, 23. 

Inglefield, Arctic explorer, 180. 
Ireland, or Ierne, 28, 57. 

Islam, 54. 

Ismail Pasha, Khedive of 
Egypt, 159. 

Italy, 19, 23, 38. 

Ivan, Czar of Russia, 120, 124. 

J. 

Jackson, F., Arctic explorer, 183. 
Jacme, Mestre, navigator and 
map-maker, 85. 

Japan, 69, 73, 96, 99, 102, 118. 
Java, 55. 

Jenkinson, Anthony, English 
traveller, 123, 124. 

Jerusalem as world’s centre, 44. 
Joao, King of Portugal, 84, 89, 
90, 103. 


John of Montecorvino, 65, 

John of Planocarpini, 64. 

Juan de Fuca, 137. 

K. 

Kalliherey, 13. 

Kamtschatka explored, 149. 

Kane, Arctic explorer, 180. 

Karakorum, capital of Mongol 
Empire, 64. 

Khanbalig (Pekin), 65. 

King, Capt. P. P., explorations 
in Australia, 150. 

Kublai Khan, 65. 

L. 

Labrador, 58, 120. 

Ladrones, the, discovered by 
Magellan, 114. 

Laing, Major, explorations in 
Africa, 158. 

La Perouse, Francois de, ex¬ 
plorations of, 149. 

La Plata, River, discovered, 109; 
explored, 112. 

La Salle, Robert de, exploration 
of Mississippi, 135. 

Latins, 38. 

Leichardt, Australian explorer, 
152. 

Lesseps, M., explores Kamts¬ 
chatka, 149. 

Lewis and Clarke, explorations 

of, 137- 

Livingstone, Dr. David, explo¬ 
rations in Africa, 154. 158, 160, 
184. 

Lockwood, Lieut., Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 182. 

London Company, 133, 134. 

Louisiana, 135. 

Louisiana purchase, 136, 139. 

Lydia, 36. 

M. 

M'Clintock, Arctic explorer, 178. 

M'Clure, Arctic explorer, 176. 

Mackenzie River, 137, 172. 

Mackenzie, Sir A., 137. 

Madagascar, discovered, 80, 94. 

Madeira, discovered, 86. 

Magelhaens, Fernao. See Ma¬ 
gellan. 

Magellan, voyages of, 96, no, 
118. 

Magog, 46, 64. 




INDEX. 


205 


Malacca seizod by Portuguese, 
94. 

Maldives discovered, 94. 

Mandeville. See Maundeville, 
Sir John. 

Mappi mundi of Fra Mauro, 70, 

88 . 

Maps invented by Anaximander, 
21 . 

Marco Polo. See Polo, Marco. 

Markets, first, 76. 

Marquette, explorations of, 135. 

Marseilles, 19. 

Maundeville, Sir John, 47, 65. 

Mauro, Fra, mappi mundi of, 70, 

88 . 

Medes, 35. 

Mediterranean Sea, 23. 

Megasthenes, 25, 38. 

Mexico, 58; conquered by 
Cortes, 128; resources of, 132. 

Middle Ages, the, commerce of, 
80; geography in, 43; travel 
in, .63. 

Mississippi River, 135. 

Moero, Lake, discovered, 160. 

Mohammedans, 54. 

Moluccas. See Spice Islands. 

Mongol Empire, 63. 

Monsters, geographical, 46. 

Montezuma, 128. 

N. 

Nachtigall, African explorer, 
158. 

Nansen, Dr. Fridjof, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 182. 

Nares, Sir George, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 180. 

Nearchus, 25. 

Necho, 18. 

Nestorian Church, spread of, 72. 

Netherlands. See Holland. 

New Amsterdam, 134. See New 
York. 

Newfoundland, 58; rediscovered 
by Cabot, 120: settlement of, 
121; fisheries of, 133. 

New Guinea discovered, T41. 

New Hebrides discovered, 141. 

New Netherlands, 134. 

New Orleans founded, 135. 

New South Wales, 147. 

New York, 121, 134. 

New Zealand, 143, 147. 

Niger, River, 24, 72, 154, 157. 


Nile, 23, 24, 33, 153, 155, 159. 

Nordenskiold, Baron, 60; ex¬ 
plorations in the Arctic re¬ 
gions, 180. 

Normandy, 57. 

Normans, 57. 

Norsemen, 49. 

North-East Passage, 120, 122, 123, 

169, 180. 

North-West Passage, 129, 148, 169, 

170. 

Norway, 57. 

Nova Scotia, settled, 134. 

Nova Zembla, 170. 

Nyassa, Lake, discovered, 159. 

O. 

Odoric of Pordenone, Friar, 
Archbishop of Pekin, 65. 

Okkodai, son of Chinchiz Khan, 
63 . 

Orellana, Francisco de, explores 
the Amazon, 131. 

P. 

Pacific Ocean, discovered, 128; 
named, 114. 

Paradise, terrestrial, 46. 

Park, Mungo, African explorer, 
154 , 157 - 

Parry, W. E., Arctic explorer, 
170. 

Parthia, 37. 

Payba, Affonso de, Portuguese 
explorer, 89. 

Peabody, Arctic explorer, 180. 

Peary, Lieutenant, Arctic explo¬ 
rations of, 182, 184, 185. 

Pekin (Khanbalig), 65. 

Penn, William, 134. 

Persia, 23, 35, 36, 37. 

Peru, conquered by Pizarro, 
130; resources of, 132. 

Peutinger Table, 50. 

Philip of Macedon, 37. 

Philippines, discovery of, 96, 114. 

Phoenicians, discoveries of the, 
17, 39; commerce of, 77. 

Pigmies, 18, 24, 165. 

Pinto, Major Serpo, explora¬ 
tions in Africa, 163, 166. 

Pinzon, Vincenta Yanez, discov¬ 
ers Amazon, 108. 

Pizarro, Francisco, explorations 
of, 128, 130. 





206 


INDEX. 


Pizarro, Gonzales, 131. 

Plymouth Company, 133, 134. 

Poland, 54. 

Polar exploration, 169. 

Polo, Marco, travels of, 62, 65, 
79- 

Polo, Nicolo and Maffeo, 65. 

Pompey, 40. 

Poo, Fernando, discovered, 88. 

Porto Santo, 86. 

Port Royal, settlement of, 13.). 

Portugal, commercial activity 
and explorations of, 84; sup¬ 
planted by Dutch in East In¬ 
dies, 122; explorations of Afri¬ 
ca, 153. 

Portulani, 60. 

Prester, John, 73, 89, 91. 

Priuli, Venetian chronicler, 92. 

Ptolemy, Claudius, 28, 42, 55, 85. 

Pyrrhus of Epirus, 39. 

Pytheas, 25. 

Q. 

Quebec settled, 134. 

Ouiros, Pedro de, 141. 

R. 

Rae, Dr. J., Arctic explorer, 174, 
176, 178. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, Guiana ex¬ 
pedition, 132; Virginia Colony, 
133- 

Red Sea, 23. 

Rhodes. Cecil, 166. 

Richardson, Arctic explorer, 172, 
176. 

Roads, ancient and mediaeval, 
74; importance of, 42; Roman, 
77- 

Rome, 15, 28, 38, 77. 

Ross, Sir James C., Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 171, 173, 176. 

Ross, John, Arctic explorer, 170, 
171. * 

Rubruquis. See Ruysbroek, 
YVilliam. 

Russia, 23; exploration and set¬ 
tlement of Siberia, 124. 

Rusticano of Pisa, 68. 

Ruysbroek, William, 64. 

S. 

Saavedra, Alvarro de, 130. 

Saghalien, La Perouse at, 14P. 


St. Augustine, Fla., founded, 

„ I 33- 

St. Brandan, Island of, 102. 

St. Helena, discovery of. 94. 

St. Lawrence River, discovered, 
120; French settlements on, 
„ J 34-. 

Sammtes, 38. 

San Salvador, Columbus on, 105. 
Sardinia, 39. 

Scott, Captain R. F., Antarctic 
explorer, 185. 

Sciapodes, 46. 

Scylax, 25. 

Scythia, 23. 

Serrao, Francisco, m. 

Sextant invented, 145, 146. 
Seychelles, discovered. 94. 
Shackleton, Ernest, Antarctic ex¬ 
plorer, 185. 

Siberia, exploration and settle¬ 
ment of, 124, 181. 

Sicily, 18, 39, 58. 

Sier.a Leone, 25. 

Sofala, 55. 

Soudan, 72. 

Southern Cross, 88. 

Spain, 40, 54, 96. 

Speke, Captain. African ex¬ 
plorer, 159. 

Spice Islands, 5, 94, 109, no, 
in, 114, 115, 116, 122, 144. 
Spices, 80. 

Spitzbergen, 121, 122. 

Staaten Land, 143, 147. 

Stanley, H. M., explorations in 
Africa, 154, 160, 165, 184. 

Strabo, 28, 38. 

Sturt, Captain, exploration in 
Australia, 152. 

Sumatra, 55. 

Swedish settlements in America, 
134- 

T. 

Tabasco, Cacique of, his map, 
129. 

Tahiti, discovered, 147. 
Tanganyika, Lake, discovered, 
159; Livingstone at, 160. 
Tartars, 46. 

Tasman, Abel Janssen, explores 
Australia, 142. 

Thule, 26, 28. 

Tigris, 23, 33. 

Timbuctoo, 24, 72, 157, 158. 


I 



INDEX. 


207 


Toscanelli, service to Columbia, 
10 x. 

Trinidad, 106, 108. 

Tristan da Cunha discovered, 94. 

Tristao, Nuno, Portuguese navi¬ 
gator, 86. 

Tupaia, 14. 

U. 

Ung Khan (Prester John), 73. 

V. 

Vancouver, 138. 

Vandals, 53. 

Van Dieman’s Land, 140, 142, 
150. 

Vasco da Gama. See Da Gama, 
Vasco. 

Velasquez, Diego, governor of 
Cuba, 128. 

Venezuela, “ Little Venice,” 
named by Vespucci, 108. 

Venice, as centre of Eastern 
trade, 83, 119; effect of da 

Gama’s voyage on, 92. 

Vespucci, Amerigo, 108, 118. 

Victoria Nyanza, Lake, discov¬ 
ered, 159. 

Vikings, 57, 63. 

Villalobos, Luis Lopez de, dis¬ 
coveries in Pacific Ocean, 141. 

Vinland, 58. 

Visigoths, 53. 


W. 

Waldseemiiller, Martin, names 
America, 109. 

Watling island, 105. 

Weddell, Antarctic explorer, 173. 

Wentworth, Philip, explorations 
in Australia, 150. 

Wiggins, Captain, Arctic ex¬ 
plorer, 181. 

Wilkes, Captain, Antarctic ex¬ 
plorer, 73. 

Wills, Australian explorer, 153. 

Wolfe captures Quebec, 136, 

X. 

Xenophon, 24. 

Xerxes, 36. 

Y. 

Yacut, Arabian geographer, 56. 

Yule, Sir Henry, appreciation 
of Marco Polo, 69. 

Z. 

Zambesi River, exploration of, 
154 . 158. 

Zamorin, King of Calicut, 92, 
94. 

Zarco, Joao Gonsalvez, Portu¬ 
guese navigator, 86. 


(12) 


THE END 
























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